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

Your Adams & Eves: We needed you – the Venetian

Gondola in Venice

Our man in Venice ended up taking on a life of his own, and we found ourselves simply having to follow him as he lead us through the canals of his home city.

Our Venetian character in Obelisk Seven is one of the minor characters, but the role he plays supporting the Big Three (Nick, Kate and Gliffy) is an important one. 

As soon as we decided that we wanted our novel to climax in Venice, we realized that we needed someone there to act as the conduit for the information dumps we had to add to the novel to move it along.

Our visit to Venice had been a real highlight of our train tour. 

Neither of us had appreciated the powerful position that Venice had occupied for so many centuries, and the unique nature of her democracy.

As soon as we set foot for the first time in St. Mark's square we lost our hearts to this wonderful city.

And then we lost them again when we glided beneath the bridges on our gondola, and walked beside the canals, admiring the ancient palaces that still exist, despite Venice's periodic floods.

So Lorenzo made his entrance, and came with a five hundred-year history, his own palace, and his very own Mouth of Truth.

And he arrived early on in our novel, and stayed until almost the very end.

A very welcome character.

St. Mark's Square, Venice

Venice from the sky

Venice Carnival Mask

Mouth of Truth in the Doge's Palace - reformatted

Glassblower's Art from Venice

The Gayer Anderson Cat – Our first sight

In London Loraine and I set out to see for ourselves the wonderful Gayer Anderson Cat, that our research for our thriller Obelisk Seven had unearthed, and just like our quest to see for ourselves the bust of Nefertiti in Berlin, it seemed that the fates had conspired to prevent us doing so.

The British Museum - home of the Gayer Anderson Cat

We marched into the British Museum, straight up to the main desk, and asked if we could see the Cat.

The woman behind the desk clicked through the computer and announced in a no-nonsense voice that the Gayer-Anderson Cat was not on display, and probably would not be on display for many months.

Disappointed, we joined our museum tour group, and trailed through behind our guide.

When we had a moment at the Rosetta Stone, we asked the guide if she knew where the Cat might be. No, came the answer. She had been guiding tours through the museum for almost two decades, and had never heard of, never mind seen, the Gayer Anderson Cat. Perhaps we were mistaken ...

Twice disappointed, we followed her to a large statue of Rameses the Great. Loraine slipped behind the pharaoh, and soon popped back into sight, a broad grin on her face as she beckoned to me.

I pushed through the crowds and she motioned behind her.

There it stood, in all its glory: the famous Cat.

And milling around her, snapping photographs furiously, were dozens of tourists.

Gayer-Anderson

We spent half an hour admiring the Cat, reading about its x-rays, photographing it from all angles.

Once again, the gods had smiled on us.

Or should we say, the cat goddess, Bastet?

Cat mummy from Ancient Egypt

Our research unearthed several interesting facts about cats in ancient Egypt.

The Persians knew of the love the Egyptians had for cats, and so during a battle in 525 BC or so they placed cats before their army; and the Egyptians left the battlefield because they feared that they might harm the cats if they fought.

The Egyptians never worshipped the cats as such; they did see echoes of their god Bast in them, though.

Cats had an important place in Egyptian life because they protected Egypt's granaries from rats.

The goddess Bastet - she was the goddess of family and protector of cats - is often shown with a woman's body and a cat's head; she sometimes had the eye of Ra, a wadjet, in her left hand - the all-seeing eye.

Loraine & the Gayer Anderson Cat

In the later period of ancient Egyptian history people who wanted a favor from the cat goddess would go to the Bastet temple to buy one of the cats kept at the temple.

The priest would break the cat's neck and have it embalmed before stuffing it into a jar and burying it in the cat cemetery. The theory was that the cat would then seek out the goddess Bastet in its afterlife and deliver the petitioner's message to the goddess.

Cat's were significant to families, and a family would mourn its death. They would shave off their eyebrows as a sign of their grief, and chant. Sometimes cats would be buried with their owners.

Gayer Anderson Cat with its guardian in British Museum

Gayer Anderson Cat from the side

Gayer Anderson Cat - photoshopped

Gayer Anderson Cat with base

Gayer Anderson Cat from side on its base

The Eye of Ra

Care for a martini with Cleopatra and Nefertiti? Then Philly's the place!

Cleopatra is one of the most famous pharaohs of them all, and Nefertiti has the well-deserved reputation of being the most beautiful woman in all of Egypt.

So when a new exhibition, Cleopatra: The Search for the Last Queen of Egypt, had its premiere at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia in June 2010, the owner of Frog Commissary Catering, Steve Poses, decided to invent two drinks to be served at the new pop-up bar/resto at The Franklin Institute, Cleo’s Portico, in honor of these two famous women.

Poses, who has catered more than 15,000 events and served more than 15 million guests, cares passionately about home entertaining. 

Moving from Yonkers, NY to Philadephia University in 1968, he read The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs, and was inspired to build communities through restraurants.

He has shared his philosophy of home entertaining so that you can benefit from it, too:

Steve Poses

Here’s the single most important part of my philosophy: Home entertaining is about creating a sense of welcome, warmth and hospitality for your guests. It’s not about how good the food is or how beautifully the table is set. It’s not the culinary Olympics or Iron Chef meets Main Street. It’s about human connection and good conversation. Whatever you do to welcome friends and family into your home is good enough. So relax. Plan. Make an effort. Care. But just do it.

And now for the two drinks he invented to honor the two queens.

The Cleopolitan is simple: vodka and Goldwasser, with Goldwasser-soaked watermelon cubes topped with gold dust.

And for the Nefertini, you mix raspberry vodka, Chambord and pomegranate topped with prosecco and a rosemary sprig.

And then drink a toast to the two queens of ancient Egypt.

PS Our friend April (that's her, on the left in the sparkly photo) made a few changes to the Nefertini for us, and the result is worthy of the queen!

Her recipe - for 4 people - is 6 oz raspberry vodka, 6 oz plain vodka, 1 oz cointreau (more if you want a sweeter Nefertini), 1 1/2 oz of lemon or lime juice, and 5 oz of pomegranate juice.

A wonderful concoction, built on the foundation of Steve Poses' creation!

April & Carly sparkling

The Vatican Obelisk - Michelangelo's Question

Michelangelo

Michelangelo was a man of genius, intelligent, knowledgeable in many things, but one question in his mind made him say No to a pope. Decades before the obelisk in front of St. Peter's in the Vatican was moved to its present site, Michelangelo asked one simple question:

What if it should break?

And he refused to even attempt to move it, leaving it to a later time under a new pope.

In 1586 the energetic Pope Sixtus V wanted to move the 330 ton obelisk at the side of St. Peter's basilica a distance of 275 feet to the front of the basilica.

In our novel we describe the wonderful story of how Fontana the engineer managed to plan and carry out the move of this huge obelisk.

When the Roman Empire fell, not a single obelisk was moved from Egypt for over a thousand years, with one reason being the lack of knowledge of exactly how the Romans had managed the logistical feat of lifting these huge stone monsters, binding them for their safety, moving them, and then lowering them on to their new homes.

Sixtus V wanted the obelisk to represent the triumph of the church over paganism, and when Fontana finally lowered it into its new position before the basilica, a bishop climbed a ladder to baptize it with holy water, and all those watching the baptism received from the pope an indulgence against future sins, good for fifteen years.

And fortunately for Fontana the obelisk did not break.

Obelisk before St. Peter's, the Vatican, Rome

The Dissection of Silent Lips by Anne Perry at the Surrey International Writers Conference

The doorway is guarded by two SiWC volunteers, and you need to show them your "passport to pitching" to get into the large hall. Inside, agents and publishers are seated at small tables on the left and right sides, waiting for hopeful writers to make their pitches. The writers sit at the front of the hall, in two lines, waiting for their ten minutes.

Anne Perry

At the back of the hall are the Blue Pencillers. These writers and agents are there to give you advice on the structure of whatever you have brought – a few pages of a novel, a handful of poems.

Anne Perry waved me to a seat and held up her hand to stop me passing her the few pages I had selected from an old novel, stuck in a dusty drawer for a little over a decade.

I don't read segments in these sessions, she explains. Talk to me about what your novel is about.

I launch into a discussion of The Silent Lips. Title taken from the famous poem by Emma Lazarus on the plaque of the Statue of Liberty. Before being shipped to New York in 1885, parts of the statue were exhibited in Paris. The words that gave me the title for this old novel of mine are stirring:

"Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she

With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Statue of Liberty head 1885

The story is set in a New York which has had a ring of steel thrown around it to stop the spread of a disease that sprang from one man's experiments to save his friend from sickle cell (using himself as a test tube, and crossing the species line by using chimpanzees). Frantic experiments take place in the ParkLab as scientists – flying in on one-way tickets to help the stricken city – try to find a cure. They overstep boundaries in their desperation,  lead by the military commander of the ParkLap, while B52 bombers trace lazy contrails in the sky above, waiting for the order by the President to solve the problem.

What causes you concern about your story structure, Anne asks.

The flow, I answer.

She leans forward, and talks for several minutes. Your risk is that your novel might sound like a documentary. You might want to personalize it more.

Take your lead character and see if you can make the story more about him/her, and drop any details you do not need.

I sit back, thinking.

 Ten minutes with a highly skilled professional, and an uncanny insight given to me which solves a niggling problem I had – a problem which lead to The Silent Lips being thrust into the back of a drawer and hidden out of sight for so many years.

Time well spent.

No wonder this woman sells so many novels!

I leave, and another hopeful author takes my seat at the small table. Anne Perry leans forward, waving aside the proffered pages.

Speak to me, she says ...

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.