Save the Cat: Blake Snyder on the role of The Board

In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder talks about a writer needing the beating ability –he describes it as a battle cry of Let's beat it out!

What's with the beat?

It's about structure, Blake says: something he learned only after writing screenplays for years:

It's a skill you must know... The craftmanship it akes, the patient work, the magic of storytelling on film, all come together in how you execute and realize structure.

He tells  how he came across Syd Field's Screenplay and found something that saved his career:

Oh! Three acts! Imagine  that? And yet, it was not enough. Like a swimner in a vast ocean, there was a lot of open water in between those two Act breaks. And a lot of empty script space in which to get lost, panic, and drown. I needed more islands, shorter swims.

His solution was to develop the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet – click here to see the actual beat sheet. As the number of pages in the average script runs at 110, there are 110 beats (pages) in the Beat Sheet, divided into 15 parts.

The Blake Snyder Board

How do you get to the beat sheet? You use The Board.

A Plotting Primer – Creating One for your Novel

You've decided to write your thriller. Now, out of the whirling mass of nothingness you have to create the lifeline for the book, the skeleton along which you will be packing the flesh of events, of characters, of description.

You need a plot.

No plot, no book.

How do you go about it?

Let's find out from a few different sources.

The Save the Cat! Man
 

First we turn to Blake Snyder, the Save the Cat! man.

Snyder says he has a Turn-rule for plots for screenplays, and its basis is:

The plot doesn't just move ahead, it spins and intensifies as it goes ... And the rule is: It's not enough for the plot to go forward, it must move forward faster, and with more complexity, to the climax ... More must be revealed along every step of the plot about your characters and what all this action means.

That's helpful – we know we will re-read his suggestion once we have worked out the plot. But his suggestion is about the speed of the plot, the plot's complexity. What about the other elements of a plot?

Help from a Snowflake

Perhaps you might wish to turn to the science of fractals for inspiration. Fractals are those wonderful pictures we get when mathematicians reduce their calculations to images. It seems that the closer you look at things, the more you spot the patterns of fractals that go to make them up.

Your Novel & Your Elevator Speech

As soon as you put pen to paper to write your book – perhaps even sooner – you will run slap into a major problem.

How do you describe what your novel  is about when someone asks you?

You will suddenly realize that you desperately need what some of us call your "elevator speech", and others your "logline".

Let's talk about you in an elevator, then move on to Star Trek and how you can use the availability bias to make your elevator speech memorable.

Now imagine that you are in an elevator on the tenth floor when a heavy hitter of a publisher steps into the elevator. The door closes. She notices your manuscript tucked under your arm.

"Your book?" she asks, and you nod, tongue-tied. Beads of sweat spring out on your forehead, and you swallow, trying to lubricate your dry mouth so that you can say something interesting, something arresting, something memorable.

This is your big chance ...

"What is it?" she asks.

You are now one floor further down, and your brain freezes. Your mind goes blank. Bits of static dance where once your neurons danced and made intelligent patterns resulting in interesting things to say.

This is when you really, really need your elevator speech.

The one that pitches your novel to the big-time publisher in the time it takes for the elevator to drop from the tenth floor to the ground level, and she rushes out to her next meeting.

The one that makes her stop, give you her card, and ask you to call her.

On her private number.

And soon. Like that night.

What must your elevator speech contain for you to get  her card when the doors open?

Saved by the Cat?

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat!, comes to our rescue:

"What is it?" is the name of the game. "What is it?" is the movie. A good "What is it?" is the coin of the realm.

So let's start with two of Blake's definitions and then explore the two concepts. His definition of the hook is short and sweet:

Save the Cat!

"It is a simple mental picture that promises fun and gives you enough of a peek into the storyline that you can see the potential."

And he defines the logline this way:

"A logline is a one- or two-sentence description of your movie that tells us what it is."

Another advantage of a good logline is the discipline it exerts on the author, as Blake observes:

"And concentrate on writing one sentence. One line. Because if you can learn how to tell me "What is it?" better, faster, and with more creativity, you'll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you'll make the story better, too.

Save the Cat: Blake Snyder on the role of The Board

In Save the Cat! Blake Snyder talks about a writer needing the beating ability –he describes it as a battle cry of Let's beat it out!

What's with the beat?

It's about structure, Blake says: something he learned only after writing screenplays for years:

It's a skill you must know... The craftmanship it akes, the patient work, the magic of storytelling on film, all come together in how you execute and realize structure.

He tells  how he came across Syd Field's Screenplay and found something that saved his career:

Oh! Three acts! Imagine  that? And yet, it was not enough. Like a swimner in a vast ocean, there was a lot of open water in between those two Act breaks. And a lot of empty script space in which to get lost, panic, and drown. I needed more islands, shorter swims.

His solution was to develop the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet – click here to see the actual beat sheet. As the number of pages in the average script runs at 110, there are 110 beats (pages) in the Beat Sheet, divided into 15 parts.

The Blake Snyder Board

How do you get to the beat sheet? You use The Board.

The Board lets you see what goes where, which character does what, and whether you need all the scenes or need new ones.

The Board is a blackboard or corkboard or notebook that divides the screenplay / book into 4 equal parts: Act One, first part of Act Two, second part of Act Two, and Act Three. In Blake's words:

It is the workout space where, using index cards, pushpins ... you can try your best ideas and see what they look like, and then begin to winnow them down. If done right, you'll end up with 40 scenes that make a movie ...

A similar approach is taken by Jennifer Jensen in her article Storyboards Help Track Plots and Subplots, and in the article The Board by Isaac.

So if you want to make your lot as a writer much easier, buy Save the Cat! and use Blake's Beat Sheet.

You might be pleasantly surprised by the results this discipline imposes on you.

Another version of The Board:

The Board

A hint - Dan Brown's Seven Points for Writers

In 2005 Lisa Rogak published The Man Behind The Da Vinci Code – An Unauthorized Biography of Dan Brown. 

She describes the outline for Seven Powerful Tips used by Dan Brown on his website (but since scrubbed from that site). 

She writes that the outline provides a revealing look at how Brown "plans and crafts the flow of his own novels."

Here, briefly, are his Seven Powerful Tips:

Setting – reveal new worlds to your readers.

In and out scene building – keep things moving.

A sole dramatic question – use a single brick for your foundation.

Tension – create it with the clock (fast passage of time to speed the novel); the crucible (apply your heat to your constrained characters); and the contract (make promises to your reader and keep them).

Research – learn the specifics you will need for your novel.

Weaving of information - dole it out in small bites.

Revision – go back and play with your first draft.

If you would like to read about Dan Brown hanging upside down in gravity boots while writing, click here.

A Plotting Primer – Creating One

You've decided to write your thriller. Now, out of the whirling mass of nothingness you have to create the lifeline for the book, the skeleton along which you will be packing the flesh of events, of characters, of description.

You need a plot.

No plot, no book.

How do you go about it?

Let's find out from a few different sources.

The Save the Cat! Man
 

First we turn to Blake Snyder, the Save the Cat! man we met earlier on.

Snyder says he has a Turn-rule for plots for screenplays, and its basis is:

The plot doesn't just move ahead, it spins and intensifies as it goes ... And the rule is: It's not enough for the plot to go forward, it must move forward faster, and with more complexity, to the climax ... More must be revealed along every step of the plot about your characters and what all this action means.

That's helpful – we know we will re-read his suggestion once we have worked out the plot. But his suggestion is about the speed of the plot, the plot's complexity. What about the other elements of a plot?

Help from a Snowflake


Perhaps you might wish to turn to the science of fractals for inspiration. Fractals are those wonderful pictures we get when mathematicians reduce their calculations to images. It seems that the closer you look at things, the more you spot the patterns of fractals that go to make them up.

Randy Ingermanson

One fractal is the snowflake one. And that concept of a series of steps making up – one by one by one – a whole inspired Randy Ingermanson to come up with his Snowflake Method of building the lifeline of a novel – how to plot the plot ...

Randy describes himself as a physicist, an author and "probably dangerously disturbed". He has authored six novels and one non-fiction book. He also publishes the world's largest electronic magazine on the craft of writing fiction – the free monthly Advanced Fiction Writing E-zine.

The Snowflake Method based on the Koch Snowflake fractal – see wikipedia for a gif which expands one step at a time to create a snowflake fractal.

Niels Fabian Helge von Koch was born in Sweden in 1870 and became a mathematician, giving his name to the Koch snowflake fractal, one of the earliest fractal  curves to be described.

The Snowflake Method's main recommendation is that it is a way to systematically add one layer on top of another, until the combined layers provide you with "deep snow" for a good working plot. Breaking the task into smaller segments is a tried-and-proven way of tackling many complex problems, so by all means look to the snowflakes for inspiration!

How does the Snowflake Method of building a plot work?

Here's a brief summary (you can find the detailed article on Randy's site).

A fractal

Randy believes that designing your novel's structure before you write it leads to a better result. The Snowflake Method works one step at a time, with each succeeding step adding more complexity and detail to the design. As Randy puts it:

I claim that that's how you design a novel -- you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can't teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity -- getting it organized into a well-structured novel.

He breaks the Snowflake  Method into ten steps.

Step 1 is to take an hour to write a one-sentence summary of your novel – click here for my  earlier post on the logline or hook.

Step 2 is to take another hour and expand the sentence "into a full paragraph describing the story setup, major disasters, and ending of the novel." He uses the three disasters plus an ending structure for his novels. 

Step 3 requires another hour to write a one-page summary sheet for each character, describing them in detail (that's one hour per character). Details needed are character's storyline (click here for a discussion of the arc of a character), motivation, goal, conflict, epiphany (what they learn), and storyline.

Step 4 needs you to spend several hours expanding each sentence of your summary paragraph into a full paragraph. According to Randy:

All but the last paragraph should end in a disaster. The final paragraph should tell how the book ends.

The result is a one-page skeleton of your story.

Step 5 takes one or two days. You write a one-page description of each major character and half a page for the minors.

In Step 6 you spend a week  expanding the one-page plot synopsis into a four-page synopsis – the product of Step 4 goes from paragraph to full page.

Another week is needed for Step 7, to expand your characters with lots more detail about each one, emphasizing how each one changes by the end of the novel. The week could expand into a month – you will know when you are finished. You are now ready to write a proposal for your novel and to send it out to agents/publishers.

Now you need to convert your four-page synopsis into a spreadsheet in Step 8. You list the scenes – one line per scene. One column shows the point of view of each character. Another column tells what happens. Randy's spreadsheets end up about one hundred lines long, one line per scene of the novel. He updates his spreadsheet as he writes his novel.

Randy no longer does Step 9 – expanding each line of the spreadsheet in his word processor to a small paragraph describing the scene, adding "cool lines of dialogue you can think of" and spelling out the conflict in that scene. No conflict? You have a problem. 

Now you move on to Step 10 – you write the first draft of your novel.

A word of encouragement from  Randy about what happens in Step 10:

You will be astounded at how fast the story flies out of your fingers at this stage. I have seen writers triple their writing speed overnight, while producing better quality first drafts than they usually produce on a third draft... This stage is incredibly fun and exciting... I've lost track of how many people around the world who have emailed me to say that the Snowflake helped them get their novel on track. So it works for a lot of people.

And now for something completely different ...

On a lighter note, waste sixty seconds of your time by anwering the 6 questions of the Conflict Test, found at this site, with a score of 1 for the correct answer and 0 for a wrong answer. If you get 0-4 then the site's recommendation is:

0-4: You are too nice a person. Watch the evening news, go stand in line at the post office, or try to go through the express line at the grocery story with too many items. You must learn how to truly torment your characters properly.

Menwithpens with advice ...
 
Now let's turn to one of the very interesting series of articles for writers prepared by menwithpens. Menwithpens is a web design and copywriting agency haling from Montreal, in Quebec, that in-again out-again province of sleepy Canada.

This is how the article defines a plot:

Menwithpens

Plot is the nitty-gritty that gives your characters something to do. You’d be shocked at how many people leave this step out of their story. They’ll invent a great, well-developed character with a personality anyone could sympathize with, they’ll come up with a kick-ass backstory, and they’ll place the story in a beautifully described, poignant setting. Then nothing happens... But there won’t be any conflict. There won’t be one driving element that propels the story forward. In essence, there won’t be a plot.

There is a difference between action and plot. Things happening to people in your novel is action, not plot.

The plot, according to the menwithpens article, is simply this:

The plot of any story can more or less be summed up thusly: Your protagonist wants something. He or she is unable to achieve it, for whatever reason. He or she achieves what was desired or fails to achieve it at all. That’s it. This is the plot of almost every story.

They add another important element – motivation of your hero:

What do your characters want? Once you’ve established what your characters want, you need to establish why they want it. These things go hand-in-hand... This helps readers know what’s propelling characters’ actions throughout your story. Either characters support your protagonist in their quest for whatever, or they get in the way somehow.

Noah's advice ...

Our next source of inspiration, Daniel Noah, makes a similar point:

At the center of every good movie there is a single driving force around which all other elements gather. It has the rage of a hurricane, the focus of a cougar, the horsepower of a Lamborghini...  It is deceptively simple, so sly and stealthy you don’t even know it’s there. It’s a question... This is the “Major Dramatic Question,” or MDQ for short. Every good story has its unique MDQ. Think of it as the story’s nucleus. It’s a centrifugal force that propels the story along its path of action,  accelerating it steadily and breathlessly toward a climactic conclusion. And once the MDQ is answered… the story is over.

Noah says the MDQ has three primary parts – the protagonist, the goal that keeps the protagonist on a directed path, and conflict – obstacles between the protagonist and his or her goal.

Noah's article is an excerpt from Chapter 2 of Gotham's book on screenwriting, Writing Movies. The Gotham Writer's Workshop teaches more than 7,000 students a year, with aspiring writers joining the interactive online classes from all over the world. You might want to check them out.

Your Novel & Your Elevator Speech

As soon as you put pen to paper to write your book – perhaps even sooner – you will run slap into a major problem. How do you describe what your novel  is about when someone asks you?

You will suddenly realize that you desperately need what some of us call your "elevator speech", and others your "logline".

Let's talk about you in an elevator, then move on to Star Trek and how you can use the availability bias to make your elevator speech memorable.

Now imagine that you are in an elevator on the tenth floor when a heavy hitter of a publisher steps into the elevator. The door closes. She notices your manuscript tucked under your arm.

"Your book?" she asks, and you nod, tongue-tied. Beads of sweat spring out on your forehead, and you swallow, trying to lubricate your dry mouth so that you can say something interesting, something arresting, something memorable.

This is your big chance ...

"What is it?" she asks.

You are now one floor further down, and your brain freezes. Your mind goes blank. Bits of static dance where once your neurons danced and made intelligent patterns resulting in interesting things to say.

This is when you really, really need your elevator speech.

The one that pitches your novel to the big-time publisher in the time it takes for the elevator to drop from the tenth floor to the ground level, and she rushes out to her next meeting.

The one that makes her stop, give you her card, and ask you to call her.

On her private number.

And soon. Like that night.

What must your elevator speech contain for you to get  her card when the doors open?
Saved by the Cat?

Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat!, comes to our rescue (we met him in this blog post):

"What is it?" is the name of the game. "What is it?" is the movie. A good "What is it?" is the coin of the realm.

So let's start with two of Blake's definitions and then explore the two concepts. His definition of the hook is short and sweet:

Save the Cat!

"It is a simple mental picture that promises fun and gives you enough of a peek into the storyline that you can see the potential."

And he defines the logline this way:

"A logline is a one- or two-sentence description of your movie that tells us what it is."

Another advantage of a good logline is the discipline it exerts on the author, as Blake observes:

"And concentrate on writing one sentence. One line. Because if you can learn how to tell me "What is it?" better, faster, and with more creativity, you'll keep me interested. And incidentally, by doing so before you start writing your script, you'll make the story better, too.

Click here to see some other descriptions in our website of the elements of a good elevator speech.

The Da Vinci Hook?

And what hook did Dan Brown use for The Da Vinci Code? The plot of the 450-page novel can be neatly summarised in 44 words, which Brown himself helpfully does on his website:

"A renowned Harvard symbologist is summoned to the Louvre Museum to examine a series of cryptic symbols relating to Da Vinci's artwork. In decrypting the code, he uncovers the key to one of the greatest mysteries of all time ... and he becomes a hunted man."

The Obelisk Seven Hook ...
And our elevator speech for Obelisk Seven?

What is the link between seven obelisks which are sending out signals, an international television show on global warming, and a new oil-eating microbe which threatens the world’s energy supplies? And who is willing to kill to prevent others finding this link?  

When Nick Kangles, the host of a global warming international television show, microbiologist Kate Stanton and Egyptologist Gliffy discover that an ancient Egyptian obelisk in Rome is sending out mysterious signals, they set out on an increasingly dangerous hunt across Europe, Egypt and America to find the secret of the signals.

Back to Blake, who says that in Hollywood parlance that one sentence, that one line, is called a logline or a one-line. Along with answering "What is it?" each contains certain building blocks that make it a sale.

The first building block of Blake is irony. Why the need for irony? Because that is the hook that often gets your attention.  He gives this example of the logline for Die Hard: A cop comes to L.A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists.

Another Blake description:

A logline is like the cover of a book; a good one makes you want to open it,  right now, to find out what's inside.

What is the next building block? Blake claims that the logline must provide a compelling mental picture:

"... you must be able to see a whole movie in it... a good logline, once said,  blossoms in your brain."

Blake writes that a good logline, in addition to pulling you in, has to offer the promise of more. Blake advises any writer who is winding up to make his pitch to make sure his audience can hear somewhere in the pitch some version of: "It's about a guy who ..."

"The "who" is our way in. We, the audience, zero in on and project onto the "who" whether its an epic motion picture or a commercial for Tide detergent.  The "who" gives us someone to identify with..."

A good logline "hooks us with someone to identify with as much as something."

What else does a good logline do? Once again, Blake puts his finger on it.

"The logline is your story's code, its DNA, the one constant that has to be true... It is,  in short, the touchstone, both for you the writer and the audience you're selling your movie to... The logline tells the hero's story: Who he is, who he's up against, and what's at stake."

Hooking with the Availability Bias ...
One last note: when making your elevator speech, you should use what psychologists call the availability bias. We can learn a bit about this bias from Leonard Mlodinow.

Just who is Leonard Mlodinow? For starters, he is a physicist and an author. Apart from being a screenwriter for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Mlodinow, according to Wikipedia, while a doctoral student, developed a new type of perturbation theory for eigenvalue problems in  quantum mechanics.

For our purposes we can forget Mlodinow's new perturbation theory and instead turn to his latest book, The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives in which he writes about how the availability bias distorts our view of the world by distorting our view of past events and our environment.

How can you use the availability bias in your elevator speech?

Pehaps this way. You make your pitch to one or perhaps two people (a potential agent or publisher). That person then has to go back to their firm and tell others about your pitch, and explain why it did or did not grab them.

Mlodinow gives an example of evidence presented to two groups in a mock jury trial, with each group then to pretend to be jurors and to give guilt/innocence ratings. The key finding was that the "side with the more vivid presentation of the evidence always prevailed" and the effect was enhanced when there was a forty-eight-hour delay before rendering the verdict.

The more vivid evidence lingered best in the minds of the "jurors", and was more persuasive.

So if you want the person you are making your elevator speech to to remember it positively, and pass on a positive recommendation to others in his or her firm, then make your pitch vivid.

Vivid lingers. Vivid sells. So use vivid in your elevator speech.

Now, go back to that building, and  ride that elevator up and down until the big-time publisher gets on it again. And this time, hit her with your elevator speech.

And then open your bank account so that you can deposit all your royalties in it ...

Creating your Adams and Eves: Our Big 3

Writing a novel gives you the chance to create your own little world, fashion your own people to inhabit it, weave events to move your plotline forward, and set up obstacles to challenge your people.

Heady stuff, but where to begin?

You could do worse than browse through a book with a title you will never forget once your read it, and take some hints from the author on what exactly a viewer of a movie (or reader of a novel) wants from the characters you are going to create for your little world.

Blake Snyder, who made millions in Hollywood selling screenplays, wrote a book every writer should read. He modestly named it Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. It's well worth dipping into Save the Cat every now and then for inspiration. We'll deal with some of his other good ideas in later posts.

Blake had some advice for writers on the types of heroes who populate movies. He presents several archetypes, that he calls Snyderian archetypes, and dares you to put the hero of any movie you can think of into one of these categories.

Here are a few of his archetypes: the young man on the rise, the good girl tempted, the clever and resourceful child, the sex goddess, the hunk, the wounded soldier going back for a last redemptive mission, the troubled sexpot, the court jester, the wise grandfather, talking animals, sidekicks and misers.

According to Blake:

"Each one of these archetypes has a story arc we want to see played out again and again. And it's all about matching what we carry in the back of our minds to what
we see onscreen. Who deserves to win and why? Who deserves comeuppance and why? ... It's how the "who" and the "what is it?" come together in an intriguing combination that makes us want to see this story unfold."

When we decided to take a stab at writing a thriller, we worked out a plotline and then had to decide what characters to create so that we could move the story along the plotline.

It took us a little while to populate our little garden of Eden with our three main characters.

Blake Snyders - Save the Cat! author

We had the hero, Nick Kangles, a very wealthy man who decides to do something worthwhile with his millions by tackling one of the major problems facing the world – global warming. A man with a mission, and the character and means to achieve it.

We needed someone to drive the story of the ancient Egyptian obelisks forward, and invented Jay Todesco (nicknamed Gliffy) for this purpose: a scholarly type, energetic, curious, an enthusiastic Egyptologist with a wealth of knowledge about Egypt's history, monuments and men and women of bygone ages.

And we needed someone to fashion the bioengineering aspect around. We chose Kate Stanton for this purpose – an intelligent scientist with the determination to solve problems posed by bacteria and the right mix of inspiration and knowledge to find the solutions she needs.

Oh, and we needed a romantic angle – so Kate had to be beautiful (click here for some idea of who she looks like), and magic had to happen between her and Nick. 

And we had our three major players.

Click  here to read  more about our characters in Obelisk Seven.

Tardigrade or Water Bear