Like many writers, I am a rabid collector of writing books. Until fate brought Save the Cat into my hands, though, I’d resisted moving beyond novel-writing books. Not because I doubted they would help at all. Because I felt I should focus, since I can’t actually buy every writing book in existence.

All I can say now is that I was missing out.

I’ve heard many times that script-writing can help you learn dialogue. Also that you’ll learn to plot when you write a script. I’ve never done it, because my plots grow out of my characters, and so does my dialogue, and they do it like Jack’s beanstalk–fast and leading to treasure. Unfortunately, my first-draft plots also wander all over the place, growing wildly as untended growy things are wont to do. This results in months of clean-up, slash-and-burn editing. Hence my recent search for an understanding of structure.

Hey, guess what? Found it.

Save the Cat is a fast read, and a fun one. Blake Snyder uses movies I’ve seen, or at least heard of, to make his points, and he does it well. I’m not sure I could follow the book to write a script–he insists that the place to start is the “logline” and I generally find those after I’ve written the book. But then, I don’t generally find a structure till after the first major edit, so maybe I can learn both skills from him.

The important part of this book for me, so far, is the “beat sheet.” Snyder lays out genre (not the ones you’re thinking of) and talks about useful things like loglines and “the board” to lay out your scenes in proper acts, but these things I’d seen before. The beat sheet, though–that is new to me. And incredibly useful. I combined it with the four-act structure of his board (he works horizontally where Jennifer Crusie does it vertically, and somehow horizontal helped me visualize it better) and spent the afternoon working out the beats for Kolya’s story. I’d still like to brainstorm some scenes–but I could jump back into writing now and just blindly charge forward and still come out with a better first draft than I think I’ve ever accomplished.

My verdict? Get this book if you’re ready to study structure. While it is incredibly important, I don’t think structure is something to be studied until you have achieved competence with more readily useable tools, like character and description. I think, had I started with this, I would have cranked out a lot of formulaic crap and given up before I learned to write for real.

Yes, Snyder makes it seem that easy. Highly recommended, and right here.

The snow had stopped, but the wind hadn’t. Kolya wished he hadn’t left his cloak with Hans all those hours ago. Under his feet the new snow creaked in the cold, and Kolya hoped Rafe’s place wasn’t far. Was he new? Maybe he would push Gevinni out of the capital entirely. If all his whores ate as well as they’d fed Kolya–

“Don’t speak to anyone,” Jadzia said over her shoulder. “Let me handle everything.” She trotted down stairs set in the middle of the sidewalk. The subway! Kolya had not been on the subway since–

“Hey, pretty lady,” a man said, but Jadzia swept on by, and Kolya stayed on her heels. She scanned a card twice, never breaking stride despite the suitcase, and they were both through the gates and onto the train just as a strident voice announced, “The doors are about to close. Please find a seat. Acceleration imminent.”

Jadzia sat; Kolya sat next to her. The train lurched into jolting motion. He’d thought it would be smooth. On rails, shouldn’t it be smooth?

A shaggy man with stains on his shirt grinned when Kolya’s eyes fell on him. Kolya dropped his eyes to his hands, and crossed his legs. When he glanced up, the man was leering. Gevinni would want him to flirt, Kolya knew. Always take an opportunity for free advertising. But this Rafe–Kolya didn’t know. Jadzia had said to let her handle everything. He’d already made her angry once–

“She’s twelve,” Jadzia said. Across the car the man grunted and turned away. Kolya wondered if he really looked like a twelve-year-old girl while he examined the car.

It was old, beige and brown and yellow, and someone with wrong ideas about sex had been carving at the seat divider beside him. Straps hung from the ceiling in empty loops. A drawing of a bunch of squiggly multi-colored lines hung on the wall across from the door they’d come in through. Kolya squinted and sounded out “legend” and realized it was a map. Of the subway lines? He wanted to look at it, but stayed next to Jadzia instead.

“Next stop,” the voice said and Kolya jumped, “Kaiba station. Transfering to: grey line. Red line. Tahachi express.”

Jadzia put her hand on her suitcase. Kolya checked the scarf on his head, and adjusted the blanket on his shoulders. His feet were damp from snow-melt, but not too cold yet. His stomach gurgled and he thought maybe Jadzia had been right and he shouldn’t have eaten so much. Or maybe it was the subway.

The car jolted to a stop. The doors opened. Jadzia stepped out and turned to the right and Kolya followed. They walked a long ways, to where the tunnels were smaller and more crowded and people grumbled and chatted and hurried about. Jadzia didn’t slow. Kolya stayed on her heels until she walked down a narrow corridor and stepped into a smaller car with tiny windows on the side and none at front or back. This one had eight seats, all facing forward, and seatbelts. Jadzia waved Kolya to sit next to a window, and put the suitcase in a rack over her head before she sat next to him and buckled into the seat. She took a device from her jacket pocket and it lit up with words and she started to read. Kolya turned to the window and saw only his face reflected and distorted.

He was starting to think he’d guessed wrong. Jadzia was too nice. Hans was nice sometimes, when he was bored and wanted to talk, but not when they were working. And Keen–he seemed scary, but he brought all that ice cream, and the jiggly food, and–maybe Rafe wasn’t a pimp. Maybe he was like Master Hiram. Maybe Keen hadn’t come for–hadn’t come only for the data. Maybe Rafe wanted Kolya, had seen him with Givenni and decided to take him. Then that john came along with his schedules and the schedules and Kolya in the same place was just too good an opportunity to pass up.

Gods he hoped the schedules were on the chip like he’d said they were.

A man came in, grunted at Jadzia, and sat in the seat behind them before she answered. Two women came in, giggling and leaning on each other, and they spoke to Jadzia too and she smiled at them before they sat down and buckled in. Kolya wondered if he was in a private car.

His reflection was fading as the light grew outside the tiny, thick window. His eyes picked out a white shape and Kolya realized. It was a wing. He wasn’t on a train. He was on a shuttle.

Jadzia was taking him off-planet.

On the other hand, they say that when a student is ready, a teacher will appear. That seems more in line with my experiences.

So I remember talking about needing to study structure. One of my friends linked Jennifer Crusie’s blog because of it. But I didn’t quite ‘get’ the four-act structure she was talking about. How come everyone else always went on about three? So I snagged her “map” and worked out a plot to Kolya, but I kept my eyes open for more information. Especially when my plan for Kolya started looking not-so-good.

When someone on my Twitter feed linked Alexandra Sokoloff talking about structure, I went, even though she’s a screenwriter. And she’s very good. But I got to thinking I needed a book. She mentioned one by Blake Snyder called Save the Cat! I remembered it because I wanted to know if the title came from that scene in Alien when I (it shames me to admit this) was yelling at Ripley to “leave the f*cking cat!”

Last week I took the kid to a used bookstore. They were having a presentation from the Desert Museum and she was hoping for snakes. I like snakes well enough, but they never let grown-ups near the cool stuff, so I wandered the store. Because I have tons of books at home, I stayed away from the fiction.

Apparently nonfiction is no longer a safe place for me either. ^__^

It’s not that I don’t like nonfiction. I love to learn cool stuff, I consider it a duty to know lots of things if I’m going to write, and it just makes it even better if no one I know already knows it. So yeah. Nonfiction is good stuff. But I get a lot of that on the internet, and when I need the in-depth knowledge only a book can give, I usually get it from the library. What we know changes so fast, it doesn’t really make sense to buy a book I’ll only read once before it’s outdated.

So yeah. Wandering with no intention of buying anything. Until I found myself in the writing section. Which I would have avoided, had I known it was there, but it had moved.

Yeah, go on and tell me this isn’t fate. Especially when the book that let me know I was in the writing section had a picture of a cat clinging to the end of a rope on the cover. The one book on the shelf that was turned cover out.

Yep. Now the proud owner of Save the Cat. And it is so good.

Fate likes me.

† No, the title is not about the cat in Alien.

How many Aries does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

• One, and you’d better get the hell out of the way!

How many Pisces does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

• …the light went out?

Despite how that may sound, Pisces aren’t idiots; we’re just distracted. We have a lot on our minds. )( is the symbol for Pisces (ably represented here by two parentheses and a strike-out). Two fish, linked together, swimming in opposite directions. As you might imagine, being the complete opposite of ourselves takes a lot of time and attention. For instance:

I’m an optimist. I believe that people are basically good, that our leaders ran for office to serve and care about the people they represent, that climate change can be stopped, that corporations are made of people (see “people are basically good” ), that putting extra tomato on my Whopper with Cheese makes it better for me.

I’m also a pessimist. I believe that people will screw you if you let them, that our election process is roughly comparable to a buy-the-title beauty pageant and has the same worth for choosing leaders, that we have fucked our one and only planet big time and it’s corporations that did most of it (corporations run by people who are utterly insulated from the consequences of their actions; see “screw you if you let them”), and that my Whopper with Cheese doesn’t matter a damn, we’re all going to die.

I’m a Christian; I believe in love and truth embodied in Jesus who died for us. I’m a Bokononist–I believe that all religion is comforting lies. Sometimes I’m a nihilist. And I’m pretty much always a scientist. (Have you read the theories that “reality” is just a projection? coooooooll–especially when it’s astrophysicists talking, not philosophers.)

Pisces do well in the arts, supposedly, because of intuition and understanding. I’d like to think so, but I’ll tell you what else helps with my writing–I have a huge curiosity about everything. Theoretical physics. The foundations of language. The city of Prague. Ghosts. Magic. Dark matter. LOLcats. Brainwaves. Chemistry (especially demolitions. >_> ) Gadgets. Astronomy. Astrology. World music. Megaliths. Squid. (Did you see where the found a squid with a hard-on? No, really! It’s not porn, it’s science!) Drawing. Dinosaurs. Cryptography. Folklore. History. Maps. Medicine. Monsters.

The problem with all this? It takes time. Time when I could be writing, or worse, should be working. Exercising. Cooking.

So yeah. All that for my at-least-quarterly cry of “I need more time!” Because, really–I do.

_____

¹ The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Astrology

Damn, that felt good.

ETA, many hours later: and then I got sucked back into writing, and never finished the post. 1,783 words yesterday, and I am making Kolya sick. It’s awful, but grand how well it’s going.

Writing this book is going to fucking hurt.