Save The Cat is very useful, but I also feel like it can become quite formulaic, at least if applied too rigorously. When reading the examples in the book, that became very clear, as a lot of them kind of switched up the order of the beats or had the template applied in a way that made it seem like it was forced onto the story rather than something that was naturally occurring (during the analysis I mean, not during the writing of the story).
So really, Save The Cat is probably a less strict template than it may seem (the example from The Help comes to mind, where the template is applied for multi-POV by switching up the order of beats or sometimes even skipping them). But then, maybe another model could be useful to reign in those stories that don’t quite fit? Because I do believe that a story needs structure, but it doesn’t have to be the same structure for all stories.
Yeah. The ranting on Aristole and European traditional structures goes on.
Oh yes it is truly very very long. I didn’t read all of it either, but I did bookmark it to come back later.
Yeah agreed. I’ve tried to look at truly different structures before, but to me, most of them seemed like slight derivaties of the usual structure, so I pretty much gave up on that. But this article did show me structures that aren’t like that, and it makes me feel more open to writing and reading different kinds of stories.
Yeah, there could be something to it. People tend to use these outlines as rigid structures when they don’t need to be so.
But then, if you’re straying away from it, how far can you improvise and still have it count as being written with this structure?
My biggest problem with it is their design of pacing. My story’s structure doesn’t fit with the traditional Act approach. What Save the Cat would consider my first act is over in like 5% of the book. Extending it any longer would be empty words. According to Save the Cat, my pacing is set for failure.
That’s why I’m looking into a different approach that doesn’t rely on acts. Instead, I’m working on Sequences - that’s how my natural writing style works and I realized that I can use it to track my pacing much better than 3 or 4 acts do.
I do agree. I follow a similar pattern, only it isn’t as detailed and comprehensive as yours- rather a rough idea of where the plot’s gonna fit and where the moments of characterisation are going to come up.
Plus having a familiar structure gives the story predictability. Too much unpredictability can ruin the experience for the reader and having plot twists for the surprise factor wouldn’t sit well with everybody under the sun. It is a necessity to have some kind of structure which can be rigid or not, depending on the kind of story that you’d like to write. You don’t have to follow a three dot formula or anything. It just has to be recognisable- at least in subtext.
I have a time travel story in the works. The consequences come before the cause in this one, which totally flips the Fictean curve upside down rightside left. Does it still make sense? Sort of. Does it shatter the structure? No. It still follows the plot-> rising action-> climax → conclusion → post-conclusion order.
The most important thing, in my opinion, I’d say (from experiences writing drafts and never finishing them) is that pacing and the tone of the book needs to be somewhat, if not wholly consistent. It can help you twist and turn these structures around to your liking. A general theme followed by how quick you want the story to be, how quick the statistics deem it to be and other logistics can help you steer through the woods.
The argument was that the concept is so full of paradoxes, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to make it make sense.
This! I’ve broken all the four laws of thermodynamics trying to write my novella and explain how it works.
In the end, I neither fully explain it nor tell the readers what happens because I’ve run out of space and I wanted it to be this ambiguous ending where nothing and everything can happen.
Star Trek has an interesting take on time travel. Paradoxes are commonplace, but it’s hinted that the timeline is aware of itself and can smooth things over as long as the major points are resolved. In other words, a dead butterfly isn’t going to change the future, but the death of a historically important person would.
I came up with a really cool explanation for how time travel works - you can’t change time. You can only change whatever you put within the time machine. Hehe. Nice surprise for my time traveler.
The biggest complexity came from a self-fulfilling prophecy I was trying to pull off (by trying to stop the bad thing, he caused it). It required crazy amount of set up. In the draft I’m working on right now, I took the prophecy business out and omg, it solved so many issues and now I can focus on the fun stuff.
It was tough to part with the delicious grand irony, but I have to trust that this will be it.
Just wanted to drop in and confirm that this is still in the works. I’ve been working on a blog series that introduces this method and have made a few interesting observations.
The most important one that I’ll give you a sneak peek of is the whole concept of a curve.
What is a story curve? It’s a visual representation of the story’s element’s value. Which element? That depends on what angle you want to look at your story from. Do you want to track story’s excitement vs calmness to track your pacing? Do you want to track the progression of your character’s internal journey, if they’re getting any wiser or are falling further into the pits of stupidity? Or do you want to track the strength of the romantic tension?
Anything you want to track visually, you can.
But the biggest realization I had was that showing people curves and telling them, here it is, this is your goal, is not helpful at all. A curve is only useful once your story is completely written and you wish to look at what it looks like, if there are any lacking parts or red flags.
And most importantly, every curve’s shape will be unique to that story. There is no right or wrong shape.
I’ll get deeper into this topic later.
In any case, I like being able to run these ideas by you if anything just because it’s easier to explain a new concept when you have an actual audience and not just the hypothetical online readers who are nothing more than anonymous numbers in my stats dashboard. It’s the difference between talking to the void, where anything goes and nothing matters, versus a conversation with fellow writers who have their own opinions.
Omg, isn’t this exactly where the appeal of publishing online comes from?
I just use one thing from their pacing, and that’s the midpoint comes roughly in the middle. I like their idea of beats though. I tried using the scenes approach from the Story Genius, and thought it totally made sense, but it quickly felt overwhelming and Nick ripped me a new one with my attempts to write the way I understood it…
I love the concepts that save the cat presents and it’s fun to see those beats in movies. Also, every good movie I’ve analyzed fell exactly into the % of the structure (looking at both, the timing or the script) and that’s just intimidating. I can imagine how much the screenwriters had to rework their script to make that happen.
But I think it’s very worth repeating that books are not movies.
I don’t think your understanding is the problem. It’s just that everyone has their own method of writing, even if they haven’t noticed yet what it is.
For example, only recently I realized that I really like writing very short timelines, that’s what feels natural to me, and it never occurred to me how different it is from the majority of writers until I saw what others responded to the question: in what timespan does your story take place. Apparently, a novel that spans only a few days is not common.
Knowing that explains some things and gives me a better perspective on what writing advice is and isn’t useful to me.
Point I’m trying to make is that maybe you just haven’t quite discovered what’s different and special about your writing. Once you figure it out, embrace it as your cool factor instead of focusing on how it doesn’t fit.
I could lament about how in my favorite books they’re able to squeeze a few months into a chapter while I have five chapters that span only three hours. I could worry that I’m a grand failure because I can’t write like them.
Or I could do the opposite and say, hey, are their five months as interesting as my three hours? Are their readers as engrossed into the story as mine are?
I choose to see this as my strength.
Oh, I know what my ‘thing’ is. I am always excited about something about my story, a collision of circumstances, a plot point. The rest is window dressing for me and I am happy to put whatever color drapes, velvet or gauze, that people prefer so long as they read it. I want them to be excited what I am excited about.
I think the movies are cut to those plot beats because all the movies used to be almost the same length, 2 hours give or take, because movie-going was a thing. It’s like that story with the pot-roast and the pot.
That’s why in our era of streaming, the series took off.
They have the same components, but they can stretch them or shorten them.
It’s complicated.
The argument was that the concept is so full of paradoxes, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to make it make sense.