Got an Idea? Write a Movie with The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

Save The Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need. Blake Snyder. Michael Wiese Productions. 194 pages. No index. $19.95. http://www.mwp.com/

Have you ever seen a movie and wished that you could write something that would effect your audience the way that movie effected you? Can you come up with plot ideas but run out of steam half-way through the script? Then Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat is for you.

Snyder takes the aspiring screenwriter step-by-step through the creation process for a Hollywood movie. He’s got the credentials for it. He’s had two films produced Stop, or My Mom Will Shoot and Blank Check, and has sold over 13 “spec scripts.” (Snyder doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to the career of a screenwriter - most movie scripts people sell are “spec scripts,” they don’t make it to the sound stage, for one reason or another that is not the fault of the original writer. But...they did sell!)

Snyder is an engaging and amusing writer, with a firm grasp of his craft that he passes on to the reader in easy to understand steps.

He begins with the “log line” - the importance of the writer being able to summarize his or her movie in a single line.

“A cop comes to L. A. to visit his estranged wife and her office building is taken over by terrorists.”
Die Hard

“A newly married couple must spend Christmas Day at each of their four divorced parent’s homes.”
4 Christmases  (a spec)

If you can’t summarize your movie - telling what it’s about in a single sentence, getting in a ‘hook’ to grab the reader’s attention, then you probably don’t have your movie defined clearly in your mind, and that is crucial.

Save the Cat, by Blake Snyder

Credit: MW Productions

Copyright: MW Productions