Story structure: Save the CatFifteen beats on 110 pages.

Where it comes from

Blake Snyder was a Hollywood screenwriter, and Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need (2005) is his book on how films are built. Its title is one of his rules: early on, the hero should do something, like saving a cat, that makes us like them and want them to win. The beat sheet is the book’s structure: 15 beats from Opening Image to Final Image, each on a page or a run of pages of a 110-page script.

For novelists, Jessica Brody adapted the method in Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (2018). The pages below are Snyder’s own, from the 2005 book.

The 15 beats, in order

A beat with one page is a moment; one with a run of pages is a stretch of the story. The share is the page as part of 110, which is how far through your novel it falls.

Three of them are the turns of three-act structure by other names: Break into Two ends Act 1, the Midpoint is in the middle, Break into Three starts Act 3. Snyder’s second act runs from about 23% to 77%, a little longer than Syd Field’s 25% to 75%.

Planning with it

The beat sheet is a list of questions. What does my hero’s life look like before? What knocks it over? What do they decide, and when? What’s the lowest point, and what gets them up again? Answer each one in a line or two, and you have an outline that already has a shape.

Start with the five turns (Catalyst, Break into Two, Midpoint, All Is Lost, Break into Three). The stretches between them, like Fun and Games and Bad Guys Close In, are what you write to get from one turn to the next.

Using it on a book written without a plan

After the draft, go through the beats and find the scene that does each job, if there is one. Then see where it falls. Your Catalyst at 25% may mean a long wait before anything happens; an All Is Lost at 90% leaves little room for the climb back. Some beats you won’t have, and that can be fine: a B Story or a Theme Stated isn’t in every good book.

Common misreadings

• Every beat must land on its page. They’re where the beats usually fall, not a contract. A few points either way is normal.
• “Save the cat” is a beat. It’s the book’s rule about making the hero likeable early, not one of the 15.
• Fun and Games means jokes. It means the premise, played out: the heist, the courtship, the magic school.
• The Midpoint must be a win. It can be a false defeat as well as a false victory. Either way, the stakes go up.
• It only works for films. The shares carry over to a novel, which is how Falcontext reads them.

In Falcontext 6.0 Out now

Falcontext 6.0 is out: in the browser extension, the desktop app and Falcontext Perch. It adds a Structure section to the Edit tab. Pick Save the Cat, mark the chapter or scene that is each beat, and Falcontext says how far each one is from where Save the Cat puts it. It also names the beats you’ve gone past without marking one:

It measures by word count: against your book’s length, or against your word goal while the book is still shorter than that, so it works on a first draft that’s still growing. A beat that isn’t in your book can be marked as not in your book.

No AI reads your writing, so Falcontext can’t tell which scene is your Dark Night of the Soul. You mark it, and it does the measuring. Your writing is never sent anywhere, and no AI is used on your writing in any way.

Other story structures

In Falcontext