Tag Archives: Blake Snyder

How humble index cards can save your next draft…

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I can’t believe it’s been nearly 10 days since I posted, mainly because I don’t know where those 10 days have gone. They were mainly spent doing a feverish rewrite for a competition, which ended in an all-nighter. 8 hours, one chair. One very stiff, sore body.

Every time I end up writing a first draft, I make a better job of cleaning up mistakes before they’re written. I do an outline, think about the characters and try to see a through-line for the main character to follow.

But I still have a long way to go. Sure, your first draft will never be perfect. But you need to give yourself the best possible chance to avoid pitfalls from the start and in my case, the main answer to this is cards.

You take a certain number of index cards, write scenes on them and lay ‘em out in four rows. One row for Act 1, two rows for the two halves of Act 2 and a final one for Act 3. There’s some discussion about how many scenes should be in each Act (Syd Field says 14, Blake Snyder says 10), but I try to err on the low side. I know my faults lie in Act 2 – and specifically in having too many scenes in the two halves of that Act.

Once you’ve finished laying out your rows, it’s a case of head scratching and moving things around, sometimes for days. Is everything in the right place or do you need to move things up? Or take some scenes out altogether? Then you do the outline, and write the script. Make no mistake, there will still be changes to be made, and lots of them. But the basic structure will hopefully be taken care of.

I hate doing cards because usually by that time it comes to do them, I’m raring to go and write the script. And the cards have a horrible habit of exposing gaps in your grand plan, gaps that haunt you and make you zone out of conversations. If you’ve ever thought writers were vague and crazy, we’re not. We’re just tormented by story holes :)

From here on in, it’s cards first, script second. And when I finish my next first draft, hopefully I’ll be glad I’ve gotten the haunting out of the way…

A confession… and my thoughts on Save the Cat

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First, a confession. I had originally planned to head to L.A. in January 2012. BUT – I’ve just had a month of unemployment, after going to two U.S. films festivals. Oops. March next year is now looking like a more realistic timeframe. But the dream is still alive – temporary unemployment will not stop me from hitting Hollywood in the near(ish) future!

After my experiment last month, I thought I’d review another book on screenwriting. There are many of them out there, but how many are any good? Next up is a classic – Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat.

A lot of people reckon Save the Cat promotes formulaic popcorn movies, and there is some truth in this. The late Mr Snyder himself admits in an early chapter that this is not a book for anyone interested in writing indie or arthouse films. This is a book on writing mainstream studio movies.

He insists that you should start by asking “What is it?” and nailing your film’s logline. Condense your idea into a logline and practice it on people until you’re sure that it’s a winner. Does your idea sound like something Joe Average will want to watch on Saturday night? Will it make him leave his sofa and pay for a cinema ticket and some overpriced snacks?

Snyder then goes through the “10 genres that every movie ever made can be categorized by”. These include Monster in the House (a horror genre), The Golden Fleece (usually used for adventure movies), etc. (I’ve tried to rack my brains and come up with a film that doesn’t fit one of his genres, but in vain. If you can, more power to you!) Hollywood tends to want something that’s “the same, only different!” and this chapter is all about defining your story and coming up with a fresh twist on an existing genre.

Next, make sure that you have the right hero for your story – and the right villain, who should be the hero’s perfect foil. Like Joseph Campbell, Snyder is big on Jungian archetypes – the wise mentor, the eager young man – and how to use these stock characters in your script. As many movie stars tend to be associated with certain types of roles, this can also help producers imagine your characters better. But as with the genres, Snyder emphasises how important it is to give the archetypes a new twist or angle.

The next two chapters are probably the most controversial – they involve “beating out” your movie by filling in a sheet of 15 beats (i.e. opening image, setting the scene, the call to action, the B-plot, “fun and games” which tends to be the first part of Act 2, etc). Once you have defined your 15 beats, you then outline the movie using index cards and “build” your story of approximately 40 scenes.

When you’re sure that you’ve built the perfect outline, then and only then do you start writing the script.

Snyder has been accused of making scriptwriting formulaic – and I’m sure a lot of writers were horrified to see a script reduced down to nuts and bolts like this. BUT, I do think it’s essential when you’re starting out to have some sort of guiding structure, and this is exactly what you get from Snyder’s beat sheet. Also, from filling out the 40 scene cards, you get a clear idea of which acts are overloaded, which ones are too light and where you may be going wrong overall.

Laurence Kasdan said in Austin this year that he studied playwriting at college and that the 3-Act structure was therefore embedded in his brain. He doesn’t even have to think about it anymore. This is basically just a more cinematic version.

The bottom line: Save the Cat is well worth a read when you’re starting out in screenwriting, as it gives you all the structural basics you’re ever going to need. All this and he has great names for scriptwriting missteps, like “Too Much Marzipan” and “Watch out for That Glacier!” RIP Mr Snyder, you’ll be missed…