Save Us From Save The Cat

Of general interest:

https://reprobatepress.com/2021/07/18/kill-the-cat-the-awful-influence-of-the-worlds-worst-writing-guide/?fbclid=IwAR1LHVi6ouHpOubJllROX8dXJPRbtYl57ICQWortyCev_4bgHrwvS0KpkNs

 

You have to get the sequel.

 

I pants and it usually doesn't work but sometimes it does but my story never has the 15 beats demanded by "Save the Cat" so I'm glad people are finally speaking out against this straightjacket.

 

That's really the problem with a lot of these author-written self-help books. People go looking for a guidebook on what they should do instead of just looking for hints and finding a way to get to a finished product on their own. It's a lot easier to write a successful book that sells if you bill it as "here's exactly what you should do" even though it rarely ever works that way. Writing is really "here's a bunch of tips that worked for me" and "go figure the rest out on your own."

 

Now we see behind the curtain…

 

Keep that curtain closed please.

 

I once spoke out against "Save the Cat" on another writer's forum. I said, none of my novels follow the 15 beats, I have no idea how many beats I have. People said, you're not published and that's why, you didn't follow "Save the Cat."

 

So much nudity on this thread—

 

But what about udder dicks?

 

I hate to derail this erudite conversation, but I think this hits the cat on the head. I haven't read STC but other how-to-write books I've read--Randy Ingermanson and Robert Olen Butler--have given me the same feeling. "Here's how you can write the kind of book I write," and so on. I'd be glad if my suspicion wasn't 100% unfounded.

ETA: That isn't to say I haven't found useful bits in both those authors, but it's true you have to take these things with several large grains of salt.

 

This is me. I've read most of them and have taken bits and pieces out that seemed important to my style of writing. A just received a comment on one of my books that my writing was refreshing, like something out of the 30s or 40s. I don't know if I should be hurt or offended.

 

I haven't run into any books at that level of formulaic-ness, though I did come close to ordering Save The Cat at one time. It's probably still in my saved cart. But I see writing the way I see everything, as a spectrum, with formula (or near-formula) at one end and formlessness at the other. It's the order/chaos dialectic. My way is to learn the formula and then start writing, and I decide as I go where I want to slide on the dialectic. I might move closer to formula for a while and back away at times. But if you don't learn plotting, then you're largely groping in the dark.

I'd venture to say even the writers who never bothered to study plotting have developed their own. My way is to learn several different approaches and then pick and choose and come up with hybrid methods. The only way you're going to get stuck in one formula is if you only learn the one and don't give yourself any alternatives.

And I'm using the word formula very loosely here. I would never apply plotting in a formulaic way, more like use it where I need more structure, but I decide how to structure it. It grows organically from the story idea itself, but guided by the plotting techniques I've studied.

 

I taught writing for about a decade in the continuing education department of the local community college. One of the first things I told each class was every teacher has preferences and prejudices, and teaches accordingly. For example, my short fiction p & p include (but are not limited to) clarity, traditional punctuation and grammar, a plot, no sports metaphors, and eschewment of grandiose terminology and obfuscation. Students were asked to participate in class, keep it to themselves when they thought an exercise was dumb, take what they could use from the course, reject the rest, and go on to the next teacher, who would teach from his or her own set of p & p. Students were also warned that I never wanted to hear any version of, "Well, Catriona Grace said..." aimed at another teacher as if I were the ultimate authority.

 

Ah, I must have stopped reading before she got to that part. I enjoyed the front, about developing the characters first. She started talking about the heroes journey and I stopped reading about there.

 

Though, I have to say I think romance should be a bit formulaic.

 

Unfortunately, there's a lot in genre romance that is "write this or die". I've seen people program computers to write genre romances and it doesn't produce bad results because they are all, painfully the same. Granted, I'm not the target audience, but there are a lot of production romance writers out there who can crank out dozens of books every year because they're basically find-and-replacing names and little else.