Tuesday, Oct. 13

Blake Snyder’s New Book Sneak Peek

Blake’s blog offers us a sneak peek at his latest book, Save the Cat! Strikes Back to be published posthumously later this year:

I grant you there are times when having diligently followed my suggestions, and worked out your structure as I prescribe, there is unease to having it all so nice and neat. There is something about it that feels mechanical, too “clean,” or too simple. And that’s no good either. If you’ve worked out your story but haven’t started writing, it may be because you’ve lost the reason for writing it; the inspiration’s gone, you’re not feelin’ it! It might be because you know too much about your tale to be surprised when you actually put cursor to computer screen.

Blake was a huge fan of structure and the belief that a story can have structure without becoming too “formulaic” so what he is offering up in this chapter seems to be good. While I have a mountain of disagreement with the rest of the chapter, I’ll save that for a future article. For now, I’ll quote the best piece of advice I could find:

My movie: the one page - This is the trick famed screenwriter William Goldman uses. He will not start writing his screenplay until he can tell his story in one page; he gives himself 300 words and no more to tell the tale. This forces him to get to the crux of his story.

Which reminds me, I’ve got work to do.