Save Your Manuscript! with Save the Cat!

My critique group partners have shouted "Save the Cat!" at many of our meetings, either to me or someone else. 

I never knew what they were talking about. So I asked. "It's a book. 'Saving the cat' is one of the concepts," they said.

After continually getting feedback from them about issues with my plot, I finally gave in and decided I needed to read this book by Blake Snyder.

IT CHANGED MY LIFE.

Well, my writing life. Maybe my normal life too.

Now I'm sure my critique partners find me annoying because I'm the one always quoting the book now. [You guys weren't actually annoying :) ]

This book is all about constructing your screenplay (it works just as well for novels - trust me) in things Blake Snyder likes to call Beats. These Beats help make sure that your inciting incident is happening in the right place, that your character's world is flipped totally upside down going into Act II, that your dark night of the soul has true impact. 

[If you don't recognize any of these terms, you need this book! Also check K. M. Weiland's site. She's awesome and really good at explaining how to structure your novel.]

I completely restructured my novel and it has improved beyond my wildest dreams. When I first started adopting my novel to this structure, I was excited to see the things that I was already doing well (Wahoo!) but also excited when I saw something in the manuscript that wasn't working that Save the Cat! had a solution for (Wahoo-but-now-I-have-more-work-to-do!).

So get this book in your hands. BUY IT. Because you will want to underline and dog-ear pages and come back to it many, many times.

-hrk