Blake Snyder’s famous book “Save the Cat” is often hailed as the best screenwriting how-to guide. However, there are five reasons why his storytelling lessons should be taken with a grain of salt.

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Introduction

If you’ve talked to me before about storytelling, you might know I’m not a fan of Blake Snyder’s hit book called Save the Cat. His book is billed as “The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need” and is quite successful among beginner storytellers. 

I would know — I was one of them.

Photo by Alberto Bigoni on Unsplash

In fact, his text was required reading in both undergrad and graduate screenwriting courses I took — at two different universities!

Yikes.

I’ve written before about the book I prefer to recommend: Truby’s Anatomy of Story. Now, however, I’m going to tell you why I actively discourage people from accepting everything without question within the now-infamous Save the Cat. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Snyder’s memory; I still keep the book on my shelf and reference it occasionally.

However, it’s not the book I want beginners to read for a multitude of reasons. Let’s explore why.

Saving the Cat

The title of the book comes from a core concept introduced at the start of the book: get a character to be likable to the audience by having him or her perform an act which is morally praiseworthy — like rescuing a cat from a tree. He notes in the introduction:

“I call it the ‘Save the Cat’ scene. …It’s the scene where we meet the hero and the hero does something — like saving a cat — that defines who he is and makes us, the audience, like him.”

On the surface, this seems like warranted advice. After all, stories are made to have the audience follow a particular protagonist, so if that character does something admirable at the story’s start, we are more likely to be intrigued. So where’s the rub?

It’s in the word “like.”

Protagonists don’t have to be likable. There is a slew of stories dedicated to unlikable or morally grey characters: antiheroes. The real goal is to get the audience to empathize with your character. The character could perform a noble deed to accomplish this, but it’s not a requirement; it’s only one of many possible options to engage the audience with the imaginary person’s inner life and outer journey.

Should your character save the cat? Maybe. I love cats, personally. I’d save it.

Still, if the goal is only to make the character likable, your character might turn out to be shallow, or your audience’s engagement with the character could be shallow — or both.

Act Breaks

Snyder likes to employ terms like “Break into Two” and “Break into Three” to describe act breaks. Even when I was first reading the book as a teen, this bothered me — what are we breaking into!? What is an act break?!

Now, I realize that the act “breaks” refers to changes in the story based on the character’s arc. This is all based on the common three-act structure which has been with storytellers since Artistotle. However, Snyder confusingly uses the term “break” to describe these changes rather than explaining explicitly what they mean. As a book designed for beginners, this is especially frustrating. Even now that I understand the concepts, I find the terms to be harmful rather than helpful.

Cookie-Cutter Plot

“I can tell when I read a script if the writer is basing their work on Snyder’s Save the Cat,” my friend said to me. “I can spot that ‘paint by numbers’ plotting from a mile away.” This fellow screenwriter, who works in story development for Sony Pictures, illustrates perfectly the deleterious effect Snyder’s methods have had on the world of screenwriting. 

That’s not to say that you can’t write a good script using Snyder’s techniques — it’s just that it’s been so overused since he wrote the book in 2005. His “Blake Snyder Beat Sheet” is ubiquitous. Many writers in Hollywood see Snyder’s book as a recipe for predictability. Audiences and artists are rightly tired of it.

Page Numbers

“The numbers in parentheses [on the Beat Sheet] are the page numbers where the beats take place. …I want my act breaks, midpoints, and all is Lost moments to hit their marks. And I insist they do. …Break into Two happens on 25. I have been in many arguments. Why not page 28? What’s wrong with 30? Don’t. Please.”

This is one of the most disastrous concepts in Blake Snyder’s opus: If X story beat doesn’t occur on or by page Y, then your script is terrible.

You could chalk this up to Snyder’s particular idiosyncrasy. He even admits as much on page 78:

“Page 25 is the place where I always go to first in a screenplay someone has handed me (we all have our reading quirks) to see ‘what happens on 25.’”

Still, the concept is so bizarre that it only further entrenches the notion of the “paint by numbers” plotting previously discussed. Page count does matter, as does hooking the reader’s attention early on; however, there is no magic number or secret formula for screenwriting success based on what page number an event happens. 

Plus, Synder’s idea presupposes that said “beat” is properly executed on said page number. What if the writer following his method butchered the story moment to land on the “proper” page?

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: Structure is important. Pacing is important. Hitting a particular story moment on an arbitrary page number? Ridiculous and artificially limiting.

Double Mumbo Jumbo

At the end of Save the Cat,Snyder gives a catchy list of screenwriting rules to follow along with colorful examples. In his sixth chapter, Snyder dubs these “The Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics.” Most of these are indeed applicable in the way he describes, except for one: Double Mumbo Jumbo.

Double Mumbo Jumbo is Save the Cat’s idea that there can only be one type of magical event in a given story. Any more than that and the audience’s suspension of disbelief falls apart. While true in principle, Snyder lays bare his flawed philosophy in his example of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs:

“I’d say proof of alien intelligence outside our solar system sorta trumps all discussion about faith in God, don’t you think? But M. asks us to juggle both. And it’s a mess. …The minute the aliens arrive, the problem of Mel Gibson’s crisis of faith is, well, ridiculous. …God and aliens don’t mix. Why? Because it’s two sets of different kinds of magic.”

 — Blake Snyder, Save the Cat, Chapter 6, pg. 127–128

What’s wrong with this? There are several reasons:

• This idea falsely assumes that God and aliens (or any other type of abnormal story element) are mutually exclusive.

• Snyder lowers the concept of God to that of physical phenomena.

• It completely misunderstands the metaphysics of the supernatural, i.e. anything outside of the physical universe.

Let me explain.

Now, this misunderstanding probably has just as much to do with his colloquial definition of “magic” as his flawed understanding of God. Save the Cat seems to equate magic — especially the story structure kind — as any type of non-natural phenomena which plays an integral role in the plot. Sci-fi and fantasy are replete with examples of multiple types of so-called magic at play in one universe, but let’s put that aside for the sake of discussing logic.

To Snyder, aliens fit the bill of extraordinary “magic” from a storytelling perspective. While I don’t think alien life exists, the reality of such life is not just the purview of conspiracy theorists and sci-fi writers. Bonafide scientists and philosophers also wrestle with the real-life implications of extraterrestrial intelligence. Regardless, “real” aliens would not be supernatural; just unfamiliar. Still, if you want to classify that from a narrative mechanics perspective as “magic,” so be it.

However, Snyder mistakenly puts God in the category of “magic” along with aliens! This is a complete mischaracterization of an eternal, uncreated, omnipotent Being as just another weirdly-shaped piece in the story puzzle. 

This reveals that Snyder most likely adhered—at least in his storytelling—to naturalism, the belief that only the physical world exists. If that was his worldview, then to him, God is even less believable than aliens from another planet or a wizard riding a giant eagle. This presupposition is mistaken, however, because God is not part of the natural universe or its physical laws; He created them.

The inimitable storyteller and theologian C.S. Lewis explains:

“To believe that Nature produced God, or even the human mind is absurd. To believe that the two are both independently self-existent is impossible: at least the attempt to do so leaves me unable to say that I am thinking of anything at all. …There remains, then, the belief that God created Nature. This at once supplies a relation between them and gets rid of the difficulty of sheer ‘otherness.’ …This, and perhaps this alone, fits in with the fact that Nature, though not apparently intelligent, is intelligible — that events in the remotest parts of space appear to obey the laws of rational thought.”

 — C.S. Lewis, Miracles, Chapter 4 (1947)

Even if you have a skeptical background and find the concept of God to be difficult, examine Snyder’s philosophical statement:

“Proof of alien intelligence outside our solar system sorta trumps all discussion about faith in God.”

Why would the existence of life on other planets have anything to do with rational belief in a self-existent God? There could be some theological implications, but aliens existing or not wouldn’t “trump” the philosophical question at all. After all, where did the aliens come from?

Now, perhaps Snyder merely meant by “trump” from a narrative perspective, characters during an alien invasion shouldn’t care about philosophy or theology — still, that also seems arbitrary.

TL;DR: The Double Mumbo Jumbo rule might be relevant depending on the type of story you’re telling, but please don’t make the philosophical mistake that Snyder did by thinking of God as a type of “magic” akin to fairies or aliens.

Should I even read it?

After all of these criticisms, you may be wondering…is Save the Cat worth it? Well, I still wouldn’t recommend it as a beginner-level book or as the path to enlightenment. However, there are some useful aspects to the book; the info about creating loglines is a good introduction to the concept. Also, the Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics at the end are useful — even Double Mumbo Jumbo, when applied properly.

Finally, the most important aspect of the book is how Snyder breaks down film narratives by “story genre.” For example, Schindler’s List and Die Hard are both in the “Dude with a Problem” genre because both are about ordinary protagonists suddenly beset by extraordinary challenges.

I consider this to be Snyder’s genius:

“Nowhere in this list do I have standard genre types, such as Romantic Comedy, Epic, or Biography — because those names don’t really tell me anything about what the story is. …Instead…we’ve created 10 new ones that define story types. These categories are all you need for now to help you identify the story mechanics of the movie idea you’re working on. …True originality can’t begin until you know what you’re breaking away from.”

By determining the story or “Snyderian” genre of a film, you can decide in the outlining process potential paths your characters could take and then decide upon the best one to use when crafting your screenplay.

Snyder’s multi-faceted approach is the primary reason why I also dislike the Mono Myth/Hero’s Journey/Story Circle concept. According to Snyder’s genres, that circular type of story about a person going off on an adventure is always a “Golden Fleece.” What if you don’t want to write a Golden Fleece? It’ll be more difficult to apply the Mono Myth to another story type because it’s limiting by nature. Therefore, if you buy the book for nothing else, read it for the genre breakdown. I still reference that when determining what kind of story my script will be!

Conclusion

Now you can see why Snyder’s Save the Cat, while helpful in many respects, is not my go-to book for beginning storytellers. Screenwriting is not easy, and this book’s attempt to de-mystify gives that impression. If you’re going to use his book, keep these in mind:

• Saving the Cat: Your characters should enable empathy, not merely likability.

• Act Breaks: “Break” means nothing. Character choices do.

• Cookie Cutter Plot: Beat sheets might be good for analysis, but not always for outlining.

• Page Numbers: Story moments don’t have to happen on certain pages.

• Double Mumbo Jumbo: God is not magical, but supernatural.

Should you buy Save the Cat? Maybe. Should it become your storytelling Bible? No way!

I do recommend, however, a different screenwriting book for beginners. Click to read about how it changed my life:

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