Writing Excuses 21.31: Deconstructing Save the Cat

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Writing Excuses 21.31: Deconstructing Save the Cat

From https://writingexcuses.com/21-31-deconstructing-save-the-cat

Key Points: Save the Cat: The Last Book of Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. Blake Snyder beat sheet. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Opening image. Theme stated. Setup. Catalyst. Debate. Break into two. B story. Fun and games. Midpoint. Bad guys close in. All is lost! Dark night of the soul. Break into act three. Finale. Final image. Recipes, ingredient swaps, and improvisation. Mapping structures. Diagnostic tool. 

[Season 21, Episode 31]

[In the podcast, not the video]

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[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 21, Episode 31]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Deconstructing Save the Cat.

[Erin] Tools, not rules.

[Howard] For writers, by writers.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] I'm Howard.

[Mary Robinette] And we are joined once again by our friend Margaret Dunlap.

[Margaret] Oh my goodness, I find myself here once again.

[Mary Robinette] Yes, it's as if no time has passed at all.

[Margaret] It feels very nonlinear to me.

[Mary Robinette] Yes. So, for listeners, we are recording this immediately after recording the nonlinear timeline one just in case you couldn't figure that part out. What we're going to be talking about today is Save the Cat. Save the Cat is also called the last book of screenwriting you'll ever need. And it was published in... this is not true that full title, but it was published in 2005 and became extremely popular. The idea of save the cat is referring to something that happens in Alien, which is literally saving a cat, but it's an action that the hero takes. Yeah, that's why.

[DongWon] Challenging.

[Mary Robinette] So, the book itself by Blake Snyder covers a bunch of different things like how to write a log line and all of this, but one of the things that it's known for and what we're talking about today is the plot sheet for... that goes with Save the Cat. Blake Snyder called this the Blake Snyder beat sheet or the BS2. So. It follows our three-act structure, which we've talked about previously, and Snyder refers to these as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, which...

[DongWon] Everyone loves a little Hegel.

[Margaret] That's classical.

[Mary Robinette[ Very classical. And he has it broken into 15 beats, and he actually does page counts for it. I'm going to skip the page counts. We've got the opening image, which is kind of your first visual image. And that gives you the tone, the mood, that sort of thing. Then we have the theme stated, which is, sometimes it's a secondary character, but someone actually says, straight up, this is what the movie is about. Then we have the setup. And this is the hero's world before the change. So, this is our normal, and we get to meet all the people. Then we get the catalyst, which is often called, in other forms, called the inciting incident or the call to action. Then we have the debate, and this is where the hero tries to decide what they're going to do about the catalyst. In other forms, we'll see this the reluctant hero phase. And then break into two, and this is where the choice... the hero makes the choice to go on the adventure and that goes... takes us into act two. So other times we call this the pinch point. Then we have the B story. And here I will say that according to him break into two happens at page 25 and B story happens at page 30.

[Margaret] Sure. Sure. Why not? 

[Mary Robinette] But it's a break from the main story, but it also carries the themes of the movie. So this can be a love story. We can get new characters, that kind of thing. And Snyder apparently says that the role is to give the audience a breather. So, it's a way to control tension and pace. Then we have fun and games as our eighth beat. and... which is the... it's not as concerned with fun forward progress. It's just like we're going to have a little fun here. And then the midpoint, and he says that the midpoint is either a false victory or a false defeat through which the stakes are raised. Then we go to the bad guys close in, so things get worse for the hero. Then we get to the all is lost moment, which is the lowest beat of the story. This is often inversely related to the midpoint. So if the midpoint is a false defeat, then the all is lost moment is going to be a false victory or vice versa. Then we have the dark night of the soul. So you have all is lost, all is lost, and then you have the dark night of the soul. And again, I'm going to give you page beats for this one just because I think it's useful to see... when you just get to hear the list, you're like, "Oh, all of these are equal."

[Erin] Is this... is there still in movies a thing where a page is about a minute? Just so that I understand like what... like is this, like, 30 minutes in when you say 30 pages in?

[Margaret] That's about the convention. It's the rule of thumb. It's not as... in my experience, it can be highly dependent, but as a general rule of thumb, you're thinking like about 30 minutes in, we're about 30 pages in.

[Erin] Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I just wanted to give myself some context.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah, useful context. So the all is lost, he has happening on page 75, and the dark night of the soul is 75 to 85. So just as an awareness that all is lost is part of the dark night of the soul.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then break into act three is page 85. So that is part of the dark night of the soul. Basically, the A and B stories come together and they help the hero figure out what they're doing. And then we begin the final act, which is the finale, which is page 85 to 110. But the journey is resolved, as the hero applies the lessons they have learned. That is Wikipedia. That is not out of the book. So we've got a new status quo established, bad guys been defeated, hero feels better about themselves, all of those things. And Snyder actually thinks that it's actually not enough for the hero to just win. They also have to change the world. That things are not the same as they were before. And then the final image, which is your very last page, which is... mirrors the opening image, showing the change that has occurred. So there's a bunch of beats there.

[DongWon] Yeah. Remember the halcyon days when movies were under two hours?

[Howard] As I look at the page counting and the rigid description of things for Save the Cat. I can see why novelists would push back against that because the structure doesn't feel...

[Mary Robinette] And yet...

[Margaret] And yet, like. and I will be very frank here. I have not read Save the Cat. I actually wrote Save the Cat Writes... I read Save the Cat Writes a Novel, but it was a while ago and not a ton stuck with me. But I do think that it's an interesting analysis and, like, reading through those beats as somebody who works in this medium, it's like he's hitting a lot of key things. Like. what is that B story? In a feature or even in an episode of television, you're always going to have that secondary plot running. Off the top of my head, the things that strike me... I'm like, "Oh, this I think is useful, maybe not so much as a, I am planning my story thing, but, like, I'm looking at a draft I've done and it's not quite working." I like the way it emphasizes that you have to have those tonal differences. Like, if you have a story that's going to end on an up, there've got to be downs along the way. or, and I think this is probably more frequently a thing, you're telling a really grim story that ends down, you have to remember to give your characters those ups. Because, the relentless patrol of failure.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's a bit much for an audience or for a reader to sort of like, oh, okay, this is just a slog and they're going to put it down. You have to remember to mix things up that way. The characterization beats that it's reminding you that it's not just mechanical. It's how's the character changed? How's the relationship changed? How has the world changed? And world, I suspect, could mean how have the family dynamics...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] In this family story changed? It's not necessarily, you know, the fall of Sauron.

[DongWon] Exactly. One thing I wanted to... just to zoom out to a meta level for one quick second here. When we talk about things like Save the Cat or when we do, basically these deconstructing episodes we do, this is really us getting to the core of tools not rules, right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] And I think Save the Cat in particular is a little controversial because it became sort of a tool at some point that was, like, kind of used against writers in terms of, oh, if you're a screenwriter and you're not conforming to Save the Cat, then this isn't making it through, right? You're going on the blacklist. You're not getting through.

[Margaret] Not the good blacklist.

[DongWon] Not the good blacklist. Yeah. Exactly. It's like you had to sort of conform to it to get through the process of getting your story on screen, right? And so when any tool becomes prescriptive, that's when part of what we're trying to accomplish here with this entire season of this show is to be like, hey, whoa, you don't have to do that, but there are interesting things here that we can take from it, right? And so, most of our audience are novelists, not screenwriters. There are things here that are really useful and interesting and we can see the ways in which it mirrors conversations we've had from Hero's Journey, mirrors conversations we've had from three-act structure. And so what I want you to do is to approach this and sort of think about what's interesting here,what can I take and what can I leave?

[Howard] The point that I wanted to arrive at earlier is that if I were writing a screenplay, which is not something I've ever done, I've written scripts for comics. I've written short fiction. I've written longer fiction. But if I were to sit down and write a screenplay, one of the very first things I would do is attempt to map my screenplay onto this to see if I can, because the tool is exceedingly valuable in that way. If I became a screenwriter, would all of my screenplays adhere to it? Almost certainly not. But I feel like there is a lot of value in a tool like this, to, at least once or twice, treat it like a set of rules to see if I can.

[Mary Robinette] This is for me very much like learning how to cook. That when you start cooking, you want a recipe and you're going to follow that recipe. You're going to follow it religiously, because you don't know how it's going to break if you make a change. As you become more comfortable with it, you start doing ingredient swaps and then you start doing improvisational cooking where you're just like, "What's in the kitchen today?" And then you start making up your own recipes. As your skills get more and more. The problem with something like this is also the thing that's beautiful about it is that this gives repeatable results, but it gives repeatable results for one type of film. And so if I was talking with someone who was talking about the dark night of the soul and that they... they're like, I've got the dark night of the soul and I don't enjoy books with the dark night of the soul. I don't like reading that moment. I feel like people are often just real assholes during that and I don't enjoy it. And so I'm like, well, look at what it's doing structurally here. What it's doing structurally is it is providing a distance and a contrast between states. It is providing a struggle. So, is there something that the hero can struggle with that isn't their own personal psyche that can give you that contrast, those stakes? Do an ingredient swap. And sometimes it's also like, leave an ingredient out. Like, if you don't like an ingredient, you don't always have to put it in. Sometimes you can get away with leaving it out.

[Margaret] Yeah. I think what's useful for this sort of thing is... it's often having this sort of skeleton to look at is a way to track the forest for the trees.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] Like, even as a professional writer, working with other professional writers in a television writer room and we'll break down a story, we'll have a plan for the episode, and then, if I'm the one writing it, I'll go... I'll be working and realize like, oh, we really got to give our characters a win early on just to show that they are making progress, to show that they're competent. We have to let him save the cat basically, to sort of have that sort of moment. And when you're into the kind of minutia of what we're doing this episode, what we need to make sure we're establishing for next episode, what we're picking up on that happened last time. And this is one way to step back, and if it's not something that's yet built in your own head, you don't have your own cooking algorithms yet, to follow Mary Robinette's metaphor. This is a way to sort of look at those things and think in terms of what are those levels. Like, dark night of the soul can mean the... it's like, okay, we've hit rock bottom. We're there. Like, what's Ted Lasso's dark night of the soul look at? It's probably not that dark, but he can still have the moment, that isn't... it's like you don't have to, like, change everything about the character, but it's like, oh, I really thought I was the best shortbread maker in this country and I just bought this store bought shortbread and it's making me question everything I think about myself as a baker. That could be a dark night of the soul for a character. It's... you have to think in terms of your perspectives and how broad your canvases are.

[DongWon] What genre are you in, what tone are you in, right? And that's the useful thing is you can extract the structure and apply it across a bunch of different categories.

[Mary Robinette] And speaking of structure, this is the time when we take our break.

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[Mary Robinette] Now that we're coming back, I want to look at some of the ways... since we've done a couple of these deconstruction things. I want to look at some of the things where we have overlaps between this and other structures. So, he says that he is looking at the three-act structure. So this is... in many ways, does feel much more like a more detailed three-act structure. We've got the theme setup, the theme stated, the setup, and the catalyst. And that feels very much like, hello, act one. Act one.

[DongWon] We kind of even remarked when we were talking about three act structure that the names of the different acts were kind of flat. You know what I mean? And I do think one of the reasons this is so popular is the names of each beat are quite dynamic and...

[Margaret] It's evocative.

[DongWon] It's evocative. Dark night of the soul. You get something. Like catalyst. You get something from that. You kind of like, oh, this is what this is. Even like, themes stated. It's like, got it. Okay, we can do that. You know what I mean? So.

[Howard] It is pretty easy to... I mean, once you have definitions for things, it is pretty easy to map Save the Cat onto Seven Point,  onto Three Act, and even onto, like, Hero's Journey or something larger than that. The caution that I'd give is that those tools separately they serve as frames for how we approach building a thing, and if you look at them all together and try and treat them as the same thing, I feel like you've stripped all the value away from the tools and presented yourself with something more encyclopedic. But it is still useful to be able to say, wow, dark night of the soul maps pretty clearly onto, like, pinch point two.

[Erin] I was just going to say that, like, this is very true, and one of the reasons I know this is there is a Writing Excuses student who, a few years ago, made this, like, master spreadsheet that has like 15 different plot structures on it. 7 point, 3 point, 5 point... I can... I will find it and we will credit that person and put them in the show notes. But it's interesting to actually see them all lined up and see, like, which each thing adds. And I think what is really interesting is, it's like looking at a recipe, like, certain things like bread, like, there are some key ingredients that you will often find in bread but you might be like, my bread is made with almond flour. That is the big difference between my bread and your bread, or my bread adds this ingredient. And so looking at them side by side, it's an interesting way to say, what does this particular format use that somebody else doesn't? Or what does it use in a different way? What does it add to the recipe?

[Mary Robinette] One of my favorite things about this is doing the ingredient swaps and doing stuff when you're deconstructing to be like, let me take this. So this... Save the Cat is very much... and Hero's Journey, they're very much a, there's someone who has a problem. They're trying to solve it. But if you do a swap and say, "I don't want to do that." Like, what if I'm doing something that's more covert? What if I'm doing something that is about, these are people who want to set up a society and they all want to get along and there's no bad guys? Can you still use these beats to do that? And it's like almond flour, which is not normally an ingredient that goes into bread. How do... what compensations do I have to make because it doesn't have gluten? Like, this is the kind of thing that's fun.

[DongWon] One thing I want to say to possibly overextend the metaphor is there are ingredient swaps and then there are technique swaps.

[Mary Robinette] That's fair. Yes.

[DongWon] Right? I cook a lot across a lot of different cultures. And if I try to apply French technique to Korean cooking, the flavors get wrong, right? Because you're solving for different things when using one technique versus another. Now, there are ways in which I can use elements of that. I'm like, oh, the French knife technique, really useful when prepping anything, right? And so learning to... what works for you and think about what your goal is, is the thing I would encourage you to do. Think about what story you're trying to tell and then figure out what toolkit works best for that rather than saying, "Hey, this is my toolkit that I always use. Therefore, I can only tell this kind of story." And I think that's where the critique of Hollywood really comes in.

[Margaret] I am not going to touch that with a 10-ft pole. But...

[DongWon] Yeah. Even that I'm like, I'm leaving that one there.

[Margaret] One of the things, I am not required to apologist for anybody, but I think one of the things that... circling back a little bit towards all... how these different techniques are the... or how these different structures are both the same and also they're each individual. I think a lot of it is just sort of personalization of tools.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] And so like, if you are someone who has ever been to a writing class that talked about structure or you are somebody who has ever taught a writing class that talked about structure, like, when I'm teaching, I'm teaching from the tool set that makes sense for me. I'm picking up the examples that resonate with the way my brain works for making story. And one of the things I try to make sure I'm passing on to my students is like, look, if this clicks for you, that's great. But if you've read another book in another class or you have another professor and something they're saying is more resonant for you, or it just sort of... it works in a way that what I'm saying isn't landing quite yet, use that. Because I think a lot of the process of learning writing is... I had an early teacher whose big line was always story is character and it's like story is character. I can accept this. It makes sense. It works. And numerous times as I was writing more and doing more things, I just have the moment, "Oh, that's what story is character means." And then I'm like, "Now I understand it." And then two years later, I'd be like, "Oh, that's what story is character means."

[Laughter]

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Margaret] It's like it's a process of always relearning the stuff that you thought you already understood.

[Mary Robinette[ Yeah.

[Howard] There's when the student is ready, the master will appear. And then there's, when the student is ready, the student will remember what the master told them four years ago. and now see what it really meant.

[Margaret] Right. Exactly.

[Erin] And one thing to remember about that is that the master and the student... in some ways we reinforce the story structures that we know. While I love seeing that table of all the different story structures, where I actually think it can... it worries me at times is that you'll have like the person who learned the three-act structure is like, "Oh, I came up with the five-act structure, which is the three-act structure plus these two other things."

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Erin] And then it just keeps going and for some reason they're always odd numbers. And then you're at, like, the 27 plot point structure, which sounds horrible. But I think part of the thing is, like, there are other structures that exist outside of those frameworks that maybe aren't... would not fit on that table in a million years, but are still very valid reasons and ways that we tell story, just not the way that we have really codified storytelling in a Western storytelling novel environment.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. And so one of the things that I'm going to say is that it's fine to use it as a recipe when you're getting started, but I think it's better with most of these if you think of it as a diagnostic tool. You come up with the story that you want to tell, the beats that you want to tell, and then if it's not working, you slap one of these on as looking for opportunities. It's like, is there something that I can add, that I can take away? Is this showing me? Is this highlighting something that... where I have a structural problem and you grab the one that you're interested in. It doesn't have to be... sometimes I slap more than one on there. Like I've got a story where I have laid down the seven-point plot structure, the character arc structure, and the mystery structure, and I've, like, broken them apart because it makes sense for that, but it doesn't... wouldn't make sense for something else.

[Howard] When I was studying music composition, one of the very first things I did, first pieces I wrote for my composition class, I took a star chart and mapped it onto stacked clefs because I wanted to create music of the spheres. And the bigger the magnitude of the dot, the longer the duration. And I made a terrible, terrible mistake in that I added measures. I forced the whole thing into four four without thinking about it. And I'm thinking about this in terms of trying to align the different plot structures. It's built on a spreadsheet which forces a linear alignment across the board. And if you don't think about the fact that you forcemapped something onto a straight line, you lose some of the value of the structure. That's one of the very first lessons I learned, and I have to keep learning it, is don't force map something onto the structure because you'll lose value.

[Margaret] Yeah. One of the words of wisdom I got from one of my screenwriting professors when I was doing my masters that I pass along... I think about this often and I passed on to all of my students. I've probably cited it on this podcast in the past, but it was a while ago. We'll go for it again. And he told us in a screenplay structure analysis class, where we are watching movies and then breaking them down and what are the eight sequences and where can we find them, and he was just like, look, the only unbreakable rule of screenwriting is you are not allowed to be too boring for too long.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[Margaret] You can be boring, just can't be too boring. You can do it for a bit, just not for too long. And the game is figuring out where those lines are. And so I think, the takeaway of, like, of all these structural things, if you're doing something that doesn't fit any of these structural sort of paradigms that we've talked about this season or here, if it works, great, go for it. Like, but if, as Mary Robinette says, you can use it as a diagnostic. If something isn't working, then it's time to go into the toolbox.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Because if you do something out of sequence sometimes, then you wind up with like a croissant which was created by accident because somebody had forgotten to put butter in and they folded it in and that's how we get croissants for the first time. So sometimes like as Erin and Margaret were saying, like, don't play by the rules. This is why we're saying here are the things, here are the pieces, and this is why it does the thing.

[DongWon] Well, one thing I wanted to say to all this, also, is audience is important, right? When you're thinking about what techniques am I using, what am I applying, right? And what genre you're in and who you're writing for... I'm even thinking about this one unbreakable rule of don't be too boring for too long. Well, what does boring mean, right? For if you're making a MCU movie, boring is very different than if I'm watching a Vim Bender movie about a man cleaning toilets for three hours, which is one of my favorite movies of all time, and nothing happens in it. It's the slowest thing. It's like watching paint dry but endlessly riveting in certain ways. And so, think about what genre you're in, what category you're in, and then how the toolkit is applied also evolves.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Margaret[ That's why the rule isn't you can't be boring. The rule is you can't be too boring.
[DongWon] Exactly.

[Mary Robinette] There you go.

[Howard] For too long.

[Margaret] For too long. Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Well, speaking of too long, I'm afraid it is time for us to wrap this episode up.

[Mary Robinette] So, for the homework, we're going to repeat the homework that we did for the three-act structure, which is that I want you to take a classic fairy tale, probably the same one that you did previously, and see what happens if you take that classic fairy tale and you map it onto the Save the Cat plot sheet. Like, what happens? Where is Cinderella's Dark Night of the Soul?

[Howard] Who even has a cat?

[Mary Robinette] She is probably driving the carriage.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.