There’s nothing to distinguish this section from any other part of the story, and indeed, a lot of Brody’s examples make no distinction. She keeps the idea of fulfilling the promise of the premise, but since she gives no idea on how to do that or how to come up with a premise in the first place, you’re left entirely on your own. These sections trade tension for novelty, which can work, but you’ll notice that most stories don’t have anything like them.īrody is way vaguer than Snyder. Snyder imagined this as a long, low-tension sequence where the hero just messes around for a while, which he claimed would fulfill the “promise of the premise.” The closest match in a real movie would be how many superhero origin stories include a section where the protagonist experiments with their newly acquired powers. Speaking of extreme vagueness, we have Fun and Games. Great, so in this section… things should happen. Brody’s version of the Debate keeps Snyder’s definition but then says it could also mean things like investigating what’s going on, preparing for the adventure, or already being on the adventure. Obviously, most heroes don’t do that, and suggesting they should is a nonstarter. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the Debate, where Snyder imagines a hero literally spending 10 minutes deciding whether to go on the adventure or not. This does obscure how silly the initial idea is, but it also makes Brody’s definition so vague as to include almost anything that could conceivably happen.

Several Points Are MeaninglessĪ common motif between StC and WaN is for Brody to take an obviously nonsense point of Snyder’s, initially phrase it the same way he did, and then backtrack to say that actually, the point could mean a bunch of different things. Isn’t it a beauty? Now, let’s talk about why it won’t help you. Oh, and now we have percentages instead of page numbers! * Okay, that’s not entirely fair: Brody did officially divide it into acts instead of just counting on us to puzzle out that “Break Into 2” meant starting act 2 rather than chopping the story in half. It’s still the same quasi-outline it was in StC, except with more equivocation on what each section means. Unfortunately, a higher word count hasn’t improved the beat sheet much.

She doesn’t have any writing rules to take up space, and as we covered last week, her genre chapters are mostly an excuse to apply the beat sheet to different stories.

In contrast, Jessica Brody devotes most of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (WaN) to that very same beat sheet. Instead, he moved on to a list of increasingly bizarre writing rules. Blake Snyder positioned the beat sheet as absolutely essential to Save the Cat! (StC), but, despite that, he didn’t really talk about it much.

Jessica brody save the cat