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A review by alexandergrantwriter
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody
5.0
~ Fantastic, In-depth Writing Instructional ~
I loveddd this book!! It was such a great breakdown of Blake Snyder’s original Save The Cat! method and did it much better in my opinion!
•
The first thing that made it better was the great attention to detail and walking through of each structure beat. Blake did this to a certain extent, but Jessica just went above and beyond and it really shows!
•
I also appreciated that she walked through positive examples of every single story archetype Blake introduced instead of comparing films that “didn’t work” because they didn’t follow the beat sheet (honestly it just felt like Blake taking the time to complain about movies he personally didn’t like). It was also a nice change of pace for Jessica to mention her credibility as a writer but not constantly use her own projects as examples like the original Save The Cat! did… that just rubbed me the wrong way and it has a lot of implicit bias in it since it’s your own project.
•
The chapter of how to craft a pitch and log line and the base formula to go off of was a great addition and definitely elevated this book even further!!
•
I highly recommend this to all writers wanting to learn better story structure, though be warned you won’t be able to look at entertainment and media in the same way again! (seriously I now can’t stop seeing it in everything I read / watch / listen to and while it’s very fun it’s very exhausting when you’re like oh now we’re at the midpoint
I loveddd this book!! It was such a great breakdown of Blake Snyder’s original Save The Cat! method and did it much better in my opinion!
•
The first thing that made it better was the great attention to detail and walking through of each structure beat. Blake did this to a certain extent, but Jessica just went above and beyond and it really shows!
•
I also appreciated that she walked through positive examples of every single story archetype Blake introduced instead of comparing films that “didn’t work” because they didn’t follow the beat sheet (honestly it just felt like Blake taking the time to complain about movies he personally didn’t like). It was also a nice change of pace for Jessica to mention her credibility as a writer but not constantly use her own projects as examples like the original Save The Cat! did… that just rubbed me the wrong way and it has a lot of implicit bias in it since it’s your own project.
•
The chapter of how to craft a pitch and log line and the base formula to go off of was a great addition and definitely elevated this book even further!!
•
I highly recommend this to all writers wanting to learn better story structure, though be warned you won’t be able to look at entertainment and media in the same way again! (seriously I now can’t stop seeing it in everything I read / watch / listen to and while it’s very fun it’s very exhausting when you’re like oh now we’re at the midpoint