Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter’s Guide to Every Story Ever Told

A few years back, I started getting serious about writing a novel. I knew I had a lot to learn on the subject, so I availed myself to the teachings of various story gurus. I learned something from almost all of them, but there are only a few that I would explicitly recommend to someone looking to write a story.If I could only recommend three books, this would be first on the list, followed by The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing by Thomas S. Kane, and The Story Solution by Eric Edson. I like The Story Solution because it provides a brilliant understanding of character archetypes; The Oxford Essential Guide to Writing will actually make you a better writer; this book, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies contains pretty much everything else you will need (along with a good idea) to write a decent story.It is the second book in the Save the Cat! Trilogy, but it goes over all the concepts from the first book, then describes and provides examples of the ten major genres according to Blake. Save the Cat genres differ greatly from what we would normally think of as the major story genres, but they get to the heart of the actual specific beats that truly distinguish certain types of stories (on the structural level).The STC! genres schema is, like the rest of Blake’s work, very pragmatically useful, accessible, and fun. The genres are possibly the most brilliant and unique part of Blake’s system. It’s handy to have a lot of things sort of figured out before you start writing your story and the primary genre it’s going to be is one of them.A notable mention when it comes to story gurus is John Truby. While his work lacks some of the qualities of Blake’s work noted above, I did find a lot of gems while studying Truby, most notably, the importance of theme. Underlying all the action that takes place in a story you should have a theme, a moral or spiritual message that you are trying to convey. Blake talks about this aspect as well, but Truby teaches the extremely helpful concept of “four corner opposition” which basically means you have four main characters which each have some kind of a conflict (even if some of them are on the same side) with each of the other three characters. The key is to have the conflicts related to the central theme/philosophy (though not in an overly obvious manner).The real reason any good story exists is the moral message it is trying to convey. Movies etc. that are bad usually don’t have a clear (or true) moral/philosophical/spiritual message.Back to Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies. It is simply the best (or at least, my favorite) book on story structure out there. I highly recommend it.

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Livre très pratique, clair et concis. Une analyse des genres cinématographiques originale et plutôt pertinente.Un très bon compagnon pour orienter le visionnage de films pendant l’écriture!