I recently finished reading Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need. It's the first screenplay writing how-to book I've read, and going in I felt a mixture of eagerness and scepticism. Having already written a first draft of my first feature-length screenplay I was looking forward to learning more about the craft from an industry professional, although I knew I had to take the advice with a pinch of salt. That was the right mindset; it's an incredibly interesting and useful book as long as its word isn't taken as gospel. It would be better used to enrich and enhance screenplays already written or being written, or to learn from and put away when it comes to writing, rather than to use as a rigid base for your writing. Snyder presents this book as the comprehensive tome of screenwriting knowledge, which it is not, because there is no such thing. Every screenplay is different and is written differently, and there are both "good" and "bad" screenplays with conventional and unconventional structures. Save the Cat! is not designed to simply make good screenplays, it's designed to make marketable screenplays, which it makes clear, and this inevitably creates a certain conventionality. That said, it does what it aims to. It's all useful stuff, especially his screenwriting 'rules'. Some seem obvious once they're spelled out, but they're very insightful: for example 'The Pope in the Pool', which basically means dealing with exposition by distracting the audience with something else so they don't even realise they're being told a lot of information. Another idea I liked was his 'emotional colour wheel', about making sure your scenes provoke different emotions to create a 'roller coaster ride' of a screenplay. His beat sheet template was perhaps overly specific with its page numbers, but very useful in terms of pacing. I will definitely be taking Snyder's advice to fix problems in my current and future screenplays, and I do recommend this book. Just leave room for your own ideas- don't stick to the template.
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