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Book Review: Save the Cat

Erin Penn

Book Cover from Amazon

Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Even Need by Blake Snyder

BOOK BLURB ON AMAZON

This ultimate insider’s guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who’s proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat!

 

MY REVIEW

My writing group assigned this as reading and I borrowed the book from the library when I saw what the kindle price was. (Over $11 – really? with the paperback less than $2 more?)

The price is indicative of the self-absorbed importance Mr. Snyder shows throughout the how-to book, even if the price is likely assigned by the publication company. I’m not paying $11.57 for a 12-year old book. And I am glad I made this decision.

While the book is filled with excellent writing advice – specifically aimed at writing a FORMULAIC BLOCKBUSTER for maximum money – the limited scope of the end-product and the underlying sexism pulls this back from wide-spread use. (Additional Note: Towards the very end the author mentions the bidding wars on spec screenplay which made him rich no longer exist in Hollywood, so the marketing advice he provides no longer applies. The writing advice still applies for the Formulaic Blockbuster.)

Putting together the perfect logline (or ‘elevator pitch’ as the writing community calls it) is a must-read, and half of the book is devoted to this. If you haven’t figured out how to create a good pitch yet for your book (or screenplay), take advantage the tutorial.

The Board is something I am going to try with my short stories, which run about the same length as a movie script, to see how well it works. Many authors swear by their Boards, but I’ve never tried them before.

The sexism is the small, underlying, insidious things found throughout Hollywood humor. Mr. Snyder specializes in comedy, so the inherent nit-picks I experienced were not unexpected. Recommended directors, all male. Strong female movie examples – Pretty Woman, Miss Congeniality, and Legally Blonde. Male movies are stuff like Die Hard. Romances are described as buddy movies where one of the “wears a skirt” – true and an example which sticks with you, but made my teeth ache. Part of it is the material available out of Hollywood – they go for the simple sexist joke and wink at the screen saying (yeah it’s sexist, but because we and you know it’s sexist, that is part of the joke and makes it not sexist … yeah, no, this is getting tired – like having African Americans being the crazy partner in 80’s movies – see we are giving them the same screen time, happy now?) No, I’m not happy and reading this book made me have several non-happy moments.

End-result, helpful read but limited in application in part because of its aim (BLOCKBUSTERS!!!) and in part by the writer (COMEDIC BLOCKBUSTERS!!!) and in part by the atmosphere/society which shaped the writer (BLOCKBUSTERS FOR HOLLYWOOD!!!) – oh, watch out for the exclamation points.

Flash: Ancestral Warrior

Erin Penn

Photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash

The silent scream woke Troy, the claw scrapes against the non-existent tiles in the dirt floor screeched against his nerves.

A nightmare, to end a nightmare, to wake to his ongoing nightmare.

Fever burned at his sanity, hiding his loss temporarily in the flames. A solider outside a war zone, but never completely escaped from the war zone inside, the damaged black man searched with combat-sharpened eyes. The dark Vietnam medical shelter didn’t rate the name hospital, but it was all his father’s side of the family had available near their home, after forgotten landmine had found him. The dirt floors and makeshift walls left a haze of dust hanging in the moist night air.

There was … something.

He tried to leverage himself up to see further into the dark, a struggle with the damage along his side and his missing leg.

There.

That.

It hovered over one of Troy’s distant cousins, taking.

An apparition. Not solid, but more dangerous than despair.

Adrenaline flooded Troy’s system, and he swung his legs over the side of the bed and promptly fell. One leg remained missing and would for the rest of his life.

His very short life, as the apparition had noticed him and left the local behind. It floated-crawled over the beds of moaning men.

Troy pulled himself up on one knee to face his death, hoping it’s all a fever dream, but something deep within said no. The same something that drove him into the army instead of suicide when his mother died. The same something that pulled him through the sand when he got shot in the Middle East. The same something that had him throwing a child aside from where they had been playing in the jungle right before his world exploded.

The incorporeal soul-sucking nightmare closed and hovered just feet away while Troy gritted his teeth and growled.

When it leaped, so did Troy – right out of his body into a new one, fully formed and encased in ancient bronze armor with a sword in his hands. His destroyed body left behind for now, dying without its soul. He had only seconds, maybe a minute, to act. Fortunately his time in Uncle Sam’s army made him an efficient killer.

 (Words 375 – first published 1/5/2020)

Other Cool Blogs: Magical Words 8/17/2009

Erin Penn

Image courtesy of Multipedia at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Magic Systems

Last month, the Magical Words posting from A.J. Hartley talked about Too Much Power. This week I thought I would circle back to an old post from David B. Coe on magic systems.

Magic in fantasy and powers in superheroes contain an affinity for exponential growth, reaching Too Much Power without much effort. The challenge is reigning in the power systems to make the story as much fun to read as it was to create the powers. 

Mr. Coe suggests three structures to control the systems:

  1. Limitations – Example, planetary gravity wells are limited to a certain distance from the planet.
  2. Costs – Example, escaping gravity takes propellant.
  3. Rules – Example, all matter is affected by gravity. Energy is not affected by gravity.

Be careful introducing exceptions to the rules to make your life as a writer easier. Gravity doesn’t get to change its rules. Well, it shouldn’t. I am sure some physicists will have a conversation with the universe creator someday about the deus ex machina of light which is both energy and matter.

The full post is here:

WRITING EXERCISE: Create one power or take one from a work in progress (WIP), just one power, for a fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero world. Define a limitation, cost, and two rules. Write a flash of 50-1000 words based on it.

***

Ancestral warrior. Limitation – most powerful in the ancestral lands, close to normal outside of the lands. Cost – obligation to protect all those of the tribe from those lands. Rules – (1) Lineage/blood-line only. (2) Peak physical, but not natural spell caster.

Look for the story Ancestral Warrior to be published Sunday 1/5/2020. You may recognize the protagonist if you have been following this blog for a while. This is where Honestly meets its Atlantis Wardens beginnings.

Blog: New Year 2020

Erin Penn 1 Comment

Meme created by Erin Penn

Happy New Year! 2020, can you believe it?

Time for those New Year Resolutions and Reviews. I started all of this way back on November 11, 2011. Some years have been better than others, but I’ve become more consistent every year. Even so, I’ve left a lot of Unfinished Objects in my wake. It’s gotten so bad I focused on UFOs for NaNoWriMo and hit 50,000 words in 2019 – and still didn’t actually FINISH anything.

This is the year to Finish Things. It’s the year of the Metal Rat (starting January 25) – ambition, persistence, determination, luck, wealth, and cleverness. I will keep up, and I will finish things I start in this auspicious year.

First, the website/blog, which is more an ongoing than finishable item. It keeps me honest, keeps me coming back.

The production schedule for 2020 shall be:

1. Sunday – A flash story. Week 1 will be expanding an old flash, Week 2 will be my old D&D stories until they are gone, Week 3 will be a Text Flash, and Week 4 a Visual Flash. Months with a 5th Sunday will have long flashes.
2. Tuesday – Will continue the cycle of Book Reviews, Editing Rants, Author Spotlights, and Writing Exercises. With the 5th Tuesday being my arts when I remember to take pictures.
3. Thursday – Links to other people and information. Still working my way through Magical Words the first week, pictures and quotes the second week, Geeking Science the third week, and Other Cool Blogs the fourth week. Random commentary happens the fifth week.

Second, is the new Patreon and Vlog. Again, this is an ongoing activity.

1. Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/ErinPenn) levels each have an Early Access and an Exclusive Access bonus.
2. Patreon Master ($1 or more a month) gets the fiction posts one week early, which means I have to have them prepped a week earlier that I think. They also get a monthly exclusive post from the present work in progress (WIP) or a flash expansion. These will NOT be published on the website. – That is an extra 1,000 words to do a month – a great encouragement to keep a WIP active at all times. (Especially since the Patreon Nobel gets an ADDITIONAL 1,000 words of the WIP every month.)
3. Patreon Knight ($3 or more) get to see the Editing Rant EARLY and they also get an EXCLUSIVE quarterly Q&A video to answer any of questions asked by patreons.
4. Patreon Nobel and Royals get access to books as they are released, which means I need to have books released.

So quick recap for First and Second to think about what I am getting into:

Four flashes a month with an additional nine posts per month (total 13), a video per month, another video per quarter, and 2,000 words from a WIP in two separate postings separate from the blog.

Right, so what else do I want to add to that?

Not a newsletter. John Hartness and others swear by them, but it just doesn’t feel right to me at this time. Maybe I’ll try it again another year. 

Conventions? With my present commitment playing politics, 2020 is not the year to commit to additional conventions. SAGA by Falstaff and ConCarolinas is all I am willing to commit to at this time on the writing side of things. (And an additional eight, so far, for politics, ugh. – Vote. It’s important. Vote Local, Vote State, Vote Federal. Every step, every year.)

Anthologies/Short Story submissions. I entered two short stories last year and got both published. But I never seem to get my act together for the anthologies. With the addition of the Vlog this year, I think I will let these slide this year. Three will hover around on my list, but I am going to not beat myself up if I don’t make it.

And that leaves, ta-da, actual books. Guess I should write something which can make money, huh? I got a stack in my UFO pile: The Small Courages of Giants, Write Good, Cons of Romance, First Officer, The Autumn Tree, …

So Third, clear at least two UFOs from my pile. I want more that that. I would like a book every quarter. That will be a bonus, the third book.

And this will all be done by Fourth, BIC every day I can. 500 words of sellable (WIP) material and 500 words of other material.

Thanks everyone for your support. 

May you have a great new year and travel well.