Save the Cat! was published in 2005, but it’s definitely had a significant influence in Hollywood, one that not everyone feels is positive. (See Peter Suderman’s “Save the Movie!” for an impassioned grump about Snyder.) While I think Snyder’s book has value, he takes existing formulas and pushes them a little farther than they should be pushed by turning them into a Storytelling for Dummies checklist. When people think about “formulaic writing,” Snyder’s guidelines are pretty much what they’re thinking of.
If you step back from such draconian prescriptions, what we’re really talking about is sussing out (in Suderman’s phrase) the theoretical underpinnings of storytelling. Screenwriters have made something of a science of this, I suspect because they simply have much less space to work in–structurally, a screenplay is much closer to a novella than it is to a novel. Syd Field’s classic Screenplay is a good example of digging into the theory. Dramatica Story Expert, an eclectic piece of software designed to help you ferret out story structure by offering inscrutable directives like “Describe how the relationship between Gail Simmons and Bright Sky centers around a manner of thinking,” is an even better one.
Yet I don’t think anyone’s going to argue that Casablanca, Blade Runner and Tootsie are largely indistinguishable from one another, despite the fact that all of them can be analyzed in terms of (say) Dramatica’s “Theory of Story.” Obviously, those movies weren’t written using that theory as a blueprint–but that’s kind of the point. What elements do these stories have in common?
A lot of it’s just thinking about storytelling in a more rigorous way. What does your protagonist want? What does she need, which is almost certainly something entirely different? Who stands in the way of what she wants and what she needs? You start to look at stories in terms of arcs, both the overall plot arc and the character arc. Does she succeed in the story’s overall goal? Does she change as a character or remain steadfast? Does she change by gaining a new aspect or understanding, or by giving up one that was causing her problems? Whether she succeeds or fails, how does the audience feel about that outcome? (You can “fail” to achieve the goal that drives the plot and still have a good ending, or vice versa.) Once you start looking at “formulas” that way, they stop sounding quite so formulaic.
Write what you want to write is always good advice–the point of learning about these theories shouldn’t be to get you to write stuff you don’t want to write, it should be to get you to write what you want better.
