Now that the summer’s come and gone, I've gotten back to my own writing. Namely, the one script that has plagued me for years: Ciao. Ciao is more than a story. It’s a tribute to a family friend who had a great influence on my development and love of movies. I only have a smattering of memories to work with, the rest is letters and papers he wrote when he was alive.
Reading my current draft, something dawned on me: my script sucked. It was thin and fake. There was no substance to my characters, and they were talking heads in a 2-d world.
As Willum Dafoe said in Spiderman. “Back to formula.” That’s where Blake Snyder comes in.
For all the hooplah about his book, you’d think I’d be against it. I’m the same iconoclast who dismisses icons like Robert McKee and David Trottier as trying to be self-proclaimed prophets of the craft and demand that all writers bow to their supposed “laws of story.” After all, just as many folks swear by Save the Cat as they do Story, right?
Well, kinda. But to be perfectly frank Snyder at least isn’t as much of a dick about it.
As I read the book, I actually realized that I’d sooner put Snyder on the same shelf as Jenna Glazter, whose book “Outwitting Writer’s Block” was as entertaining a read as it was pragmatic and practical. Not that Snyder doesn’t have his share of “and that single anecdote and one example is the reason that this story rule is universal and you’re wrong” moments, but at least he’s funny when he does it.
At the core of my problems is the core of my story: the structure. As I read it, I realized that if this script had been handed to me during the contest, I would have absolutely tossed it in the “No” pile. My own script. And I’m supposed to be biased FOR my own work!
So far I understand what Snyder is getting at with his “Beat Sheet” idea. It’s pretty much a standard movie outline, only with 15 steps instead of 12, and based on plot points rather than chunks of pages (though he is VERY rigid about what page things are supposed to end up on). It makes a lot of sense in theory, and I’ve tried to pay attention to it as I watch movies lately. So far, he’s been right more times than not, but there’s one thing I realize I never completely understood: The Midpoint. He explains each element in simple terms with clear examples. Some of them are quite hokey, like “bad guys close in” and “break into two” (which took me about an hour to figure out that he meant ACT two and not the story splitting off or something) but that might be due to my own lack of comprehension than his writing.
He’s just as patronizing as any other writing guide author, and for some reason he rips on Memento a lot, but if you can look past those two little issues I think it would behoove any writer to give “Save the Cat” a look. Don’t worry, I’m pretty sure no one else has seen half the movies he references either.
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