By Marissa Dunham //
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need by Jessica Brody
Plot. How do we fix it and why is it a problem spot for so many writers?
If you read last month’s column, a review on Alan Watt’s The 90-Day Novel, you’ll have an understanding that plot and story structure are two different elements that make a story.
Plot is a series of events. Structure is how you organize those events. So when we’re talking about plot, problems with plot, or how you may have hit a roadblock (desperately needing a cup of coffee) and aren’t sure what’s supposed to come next in your story, what we’re really talking about is an issue with structure, and we need to look at how you’ve organized the events in your story in order to move the story forward.
How Can Save the Cat! Writes a Novel Help You with Story Structure?
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel is about a three-act story structure, with a specific set of 15 plot points (or story beats). Brody adopted this method from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. Her claim is that this story structure she adopted from Snyder appears in almost all successful movies and novels in the last couple hundred years. I can’t say that her method will solve the world’s problems or give you a book that will make you millions of dollars, but what I can say is that it does have some truth to it.
The story structure does sharpen your plot and help you discover naturally what is meant to come next in your story as you write.
You can use the method at any stage in your writing—most use it at the beginning to outline the novel first and then drift through the story beats, allowing the characters to inform their writing and the novel to mature beyond the outline they started with.
How Is Save the Cat! Writes a Novel Useful?
Brody does a thorough job of explaining how and when to use each of her story beats.
More importantly for O.C. Writers, the method is friendly enough to allow for the tropes and special knowledge in many kinds of stories. You might find it enjoyable to use these 15 points for a mystery, romance, stage of life, science fiction, or fantasy novel. You could probably even manage it with a western. Brody’s definitions for genres are so broad that, as she puts it in Chapter 3, this book can “fit any story.” And it does seem to.
I didn’t come across Save the Cat! Writes a Novel until after I started this series reviewing books on craft. My personal first how-to book was Ernest Hemingway on Writing edited by Larry W. Phillips. And after reading the Save the Cat! book for this series, I found Brody’s book to be very accessible for beginners and intermediate writers and that her broad definitions of genres allow her approach to be surprisingly flexible. I even compared her story beats to a work in progress I’d put in a drawer awhile back and found that her questions helped me finally stop rewriting the opening (a bad habit I’d picked up in recent years).
Features
The book is a solid read. At 304 pages (not including back matter), you should be able to take this one at a leisurely pace.
Because Save the Cat! originated from a book on how to write screenplays, many intermediate writers find value in how Brody explains scenes in a novel as a cinematic experience.
The last chapter in the book is the most intriguing. The chapter is full of practice exercises, story-boarding diagrams, visuals to see where your story is having issues, explanations for when it is OK to have more than one main character, how to handle an unlikable main character, how to use a beat sheet, definitions with examples for different points of view, and other practical writerly wisdoms.
Who Is This Book For?
This book is best for beginning and intermediate writers.
Final Thoughts
As many books on craft as I may be able to review with you, we won’t be able to find exactly what you need to get unstuck. It’s simply going to depend. Brody provides a format that may give you a foundation from which to build many new worlds. Or, help you get at a problem in a way that you hadn’t thought of before. Please don’t get too tied up in the details—that you must write a three-act story structure in order to write a good story. Use Brody’s book to grow, trusting in your own good instincts on what your story is about.
Next month we will be changing up the format of this series a little. I will still review books on writing craft, but instead of having a long review on one book, we’ll go by categories, with five books on a specific topic: Your First Craft Book, Deep Thinkers, Point of View, Story Structure, Character, The Writer’s Life, and so on.
Marissa’s Take Practice Exercise: Write a sentence that describes what your story is about.
MARISSA DUNHAM is a writer and freelance editor. She spent the early part of her career in educational publishing, but now spends most of her time editing literary fiction, magical realism, and middle grade fiction. She lives in Southern California, where she enjoys bringing new life into the world by planting tomatoes and flowers in the garden.
Nice review of Brody’s book. It’s a favorite on my craft shelf. I highly recommend it!