Blake Snyder didn’t invent them, he just noticed them. And once I knew what the beats were and started paying attention, I realized that they’re universal. He describes them in a clear way that made sense to me as a fledgling fiction writer. It converted me from a pantser to a plotter, and it’s no coincidence that the first book I actually finished was conceived using the beat sheet.īlake Snyder’s beat sheet has 15 beats. The masterpiece of Save the Cat! is the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet. It helped me understand for the first time that story has a universal structure. It is a meandering and surprising historical ghost story, so different than many Disney movies, yet the beats are all there, just the same.įor me, reading Save the Cat! was an epiphany. One good example was Seer of Shadows by Avi. And I’ll be darned if all of the beats weren’t there in just about every novel we read. The Middle Grade Lunch Break group read Save the Cat!, and for several months afterwards, as an exercise, we applied the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet to the middle grade novels that we were reading. Zootopia, for example, is a model Save the Cat! movie: it has a strong theme, shows good character growth for all of the characters, not just the main character, and hits all of the plot points Snyder describes.īut the beat sheet isn’t just for movies. It’s especially easy to see in Disney and Pixar films, as well as other kids’ movies.

Many movies do use the beat sheet, created by Blake Snyder. You might think that Save the Cat ! is just a book about screenwriting, given that its subtitle is “The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need.”

Cat screenplay