19 August 2008 152 views 5 Comments

The book’s intriguing title is explained in the introduction. It’s about having your hero do something that makes the audience sympathetic. The book is subtitled ‘The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need’. Although I wouldn’t be so bold, suffice it to say that by the end of the book, I felt I know enough about planning a screenplay to turn out something credible. So, what’s inside?

Inside Save The Cat

Eight chapters of straight talk, that’s what. Chapter 1 helps you to take your idea and formultate it into a logline, giving four ways to make it better. It also shows you how to test your pitch before doing it for real. Chapter 2 tells you about genre. Blake Snyder uses his own titles here, such as Monster in the House, Dude with a Problem and so on, helping us to see how different movies are examples of the same thing.

Chapter 3 is about your hero: how and why the hero works with your idea and which archetypes you need to think of in creating a hero. Chapter 4 shows the beats of a movie. According to Snyder there are 15 of them and he gives an example of how these appear in a popular movie. The following chapter shows you how to create a frame for your screenplay using these beats.

Getting To Grips With Writing

Chapter 6 shows us how to get to grips with the writing, using techniques such as Pope in the Pool (distracting the audience from necessary exposition) and the Covenant of the Arc (which is all about character development). Chapter 7 is about checking your work and chapter 8 is about marketing it. There’s also a handy glossary at the end.

My Verdict

Blake Snyder is either loved or loathed by critics, but the proof of the pudding for me was that I was able to see how various bits of script and writing techniques were used in a recent film, 88 Minutes. I could see how the writer created sympathy at a crucial moment and where necessary distractions were included. I learned a lot from Snyder’s book and it’s made me seriously consider writing a screenplay.