Theme, character, and saving cats

In “The mad science of story structure,” I talked about—yes—story structure. I got into character arc vs. plot arc, and gave a high-level overview of Dramatica’s “theory of story” and how it takes those two major arcs and organizes them as four “throughlines,” three of which revolve around the character arc. The plot arc drives the story and generally provides the big, flashy set pieces—the space station exploding, the hero going over the cliff, the giant coyote dragon stomping the bus—but the struggle, metaphorical or literal, between the main character and the influence character makes the story memorable.

As that post hinted, there’s a whole cottage industry around explaining story and plot through the lens of structure analysis. Dig into this and you’ll read about the three-act structure and about try/fail cycles. In a writing workshop I took a few years back, the instructor talked about “The ‘W’ Plot,” which looks like this:

I’ll make you follow that link for a more detailed explanation, but you can get the gist of it just from the picture. The observant among you will notice it’s four acts in that diagram, not three: the distinction is a red herring. All the three-act structures I’ve seen have a double-length third act divided into halves that have different dramatic purposes; some people look at that and say, “come on, that’s clearly four acts,” and they’re not wrong.

The reigning king of screenplay structure books is the late Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! (named from the book’s initial argument, “liking the person we go on a journey with is the single most important element in drawing us into the story”). Subtitled The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, it argues you need an even more structured templated to follow. Snyder divides a screenplay into 15 “beats”:

(Yes, back to three acts, sort of.) The catchy names are specific moments Snyder thinks every story needs some variant of. The numbers are page numbers. Yes. Snyder argues these “beats” have to happen at precise moments. He pays lip service to the notion that these are general guidelines, yet the book oozes commentary like, “My catalyst moment will float around for the first couple of drafts. The set-up will be too long, the story is clogged with details, and that page 12 catalyst beat is somehow on page 20. Well, cut it down and put it where it belongs: page 12.” Page 12, do you hear me? You have your catalyst moment on page 13? By God, take out one page right now or be doomed to failure, you heathen!

Some folks, particularly movie critics, consider the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet, as he calls it, the worst thing to happen to Hollywood in decades. Snyder makes no bones about being relentlessly, almost comically commercial, sneering at indie films and niche stories and urging us to find the most “demographically pleasing” heroes. The best-selling screenplay book of all time literally tells aspiring writers to target straight white dudes in the 18–34 age range. Wonder why it took so damn long for the modern superhero craze to get around to a black-centered story, or a woman-centered story? (Not to mention the virtual elimination of “mid-budget” movies from major studios.)

If we step back, though, it’s a formula that doesn’t look that different from the W Plot. The truth is that most stories that stick with us do hit Snyder’s beats. The problem with Save the Cat! (other than “target young straight white dudes”) isn’t the beat sheet itself; it’s the de-emphasizing of character and theme. Snyder acknowledges they’re important, but he spends all of two paragraphs on the concept of the thematic premise, the notion that “a good screenplay is an argument posed by the screenwriter.”

This is where Dramatica pops its weirdo head up again, clears its throat, and repeats the two big takeaway points from my earlier post: 

• Your story’s plot is driven by the conflict between the protagonist and the antagonist.
• Your story’s theme is driven by the argument between the viewpoints of the main character and the influence character.

In Goddess, Russell’s friend Marvin tells him in the first scene that he can’t just go through life like it was a checklist of goals to meet. Russell believes that’s how one should go through life, both on a day-to-day basis and as a long-term plan. Falling in love with an island princess is manifestly not one of his to-do items. A lot of the story’s tension comes from the “argument” between Russell and Kailani; the resolution of the story’s overall plot arc requires Russell to make a definitive, no-going-back choice to metaphorically throw out his checklist, which leads to the resolution of the character arc. Snyder doesn’t focus on the story having two major arcs; that’s not a crippling flaw in his approach, but it’s still a flaw.

But, but, but: Goddess roughly follows the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet.

When Marvin gets exasperated at Russell at the end of the first chapter, though, that’s a “theme stated” moment, isn’t it? My catalyst, Russell meeting Kailani at the party, comes before that rather than after, but that’s fine (it does not have to precisely be on page five, goddammit, Blake). There are turns! There’s “the debate!” There’s the “All is Lost” beat! And here’s the crazy thing: I wasn’t looking at Snyder’s book when I was writing. I’d read it earlier, but I wasn’t trying to follow it. If you’ve got the story narrative right, though, you’re going to find that it does have that “W” shape.

The real value of Save the Cat! isn’t as a way to build a story from the ground up. That tempts you to twist your story to fit its too-precise measures, to force your characters to make dumb choices to get them in the right place or the right emotional state at the right time. But it’s an excellent diagnostic tool for your rough draft, or if you have one, your outline. Can you identify the catalyst? Are there turns at the rough quarter marks? What about the opening scene and the final scene? If you’re doing a full-blown scene outline like I am for Red Savina, what do you see when you put the scenes you know along a timeline divided into four quarters? If the first leg of your “W” has most of the scenes and the last leg has just one or two, well, you can literally see the holes you have to fill.

So: back to Red Savina.

I still got holes.

Less holes than I did at the start of the month, but more than I’d hoped for at this point, and in part that’s because there are some important questions that still have pretty squishy answers. I’m working on firming them up, and also kind of dying to talk about them and frustrated that I can’t without giving important things away.

On Twitter, I hinted that I’d made a predictable-for-me change in the story from what I described in the last post, which posed three characters:

• Gabriel, our upper-class protagonist and main character;
• Coyote X, Red Savina’s up-from-working class alter ego and influence character;
• Somebody else involved with those two.

The ghost of Blake Snyder would tell me that Gabriel should be as close to a 22-year-old white dude as our story allows, and “somebody else” is another man to add that potential (straight) love triangle tension. But what if Coyote X is bisexual? We’re setting the story in a time when that was at best scandalous and at worst actively dangerous; if one of her suitors is a guy and the other is a gal, that makes things much more fascinatingly complicated, doesn’t it? So maybe “somebody else” is a woman!

Or…maybe Gabriel is Gabrielle.

How does that change things? Well, for a start, if she’s a high society woman, she’s probably married, which adds even more complications. Is she having an extramarital affair with—you know what, I’m going to stop calling her “Coyote X.” Her name is Mirasol. At this point in my outline I’m not sure there’s going to be any other coyote women, and all of you know the Jekyll & Hyde connection. The other characters don’t, and there’s no reason for them to connect her to Red Savina, but you all are going to connect them instantly. So is Gabrielle having an extramarital affair with Mirasol? Is she recently widowed? Is she recently widowed because of Red Savina?

And just what is this story’s thematic argument shaping up to be? Surely something about class, contrasting Gabrielle’s privilege with Mirasol’s working class roots. Maybe Mirasol is an activist. Maybe she’s an anarchist. Maybe Red Savina ties into that.

(Maybe I keep saying “maybe” for dramatic effect and have most of this worked out already.)

It’s tough to explain the story problems I’m working through now without spoilers; I’ll just say that it has to do with the character arc, and with the “most” in that parenthetical: the truth is, I’m still testing a few options to see which ones carry the most dramatic weight while still being paths I can figure out how to logically pull off.

This article is getting long, so a couple housekeeping notes:

• I do have an artist contracted to do at least the cover for the Saida & Autumn book, and possibly interior art. I have to get back in touch with her to see what the status is, though; it’s been about a month since I’ve heard from her.
• I still haven’t figured out how to post the screenplay, due to the form’s weird formatting and to the inconvenient fact that screenplays aren’t meant to be serialized. (We knew the job would be difficult going in.) My thought now is that the serialization posts will have both plain text versions without the “proper” formatting and a link to a “everything to date” PDF.
• I have no idea how I’m going to get illustrations for the screenplay yet, but dear goddess, I want them.

And, lastly, I do hope to get this posting back on a regular schedule this month. I can’t promise it yet, but I’m working on it!