The Save the Cat Beat Sheet: How Universal Is It?

Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat! offers a blueprint for screenwriters on how to draft a successful film script. The book draws on his experience as a Hollywood screenwriter and outlines a beat sheet that describes the different points and pacing in many winning films.

Somewhat later, Jessica Brody transformed the insights into a craft book for novel writing called Save the Cat! Writes a Novel. Her book includes a similar beat sheet, and she also categorises novels based on the underlying theme in the story.

In this blog post, I'll briefly describe what the beat sheet covers and then I'll share my thoughts on what cultural anthropologists have to say about this topic, and how useful it is for fiction authors.

The idea behind the Save the Cat! beat sheet

The Save the Cat beat sheet is based on the idea that good stories have strong characters with human flaws who go on a journey (the plot). Such stories typically feature a ‘flawed hero’ and a narrative that takes us through that hero’s transformation as they overcome this character flaw. Of course, the path to this transformation is strewn with conflicts and obstacles.

The phrase Save the Cat! is a reference to the kind of action the story protagonist should complete in the opening scenes of a novel so the reader wants to root for the protagonist. Even if the protagonist has many dislikable qualities, then doing something like this will help the reader get attached to the protagonist and be interested in their perspective and the story.

If a grumpy, stingy old person living alone goes downstairs and saves a cat stuck in the tree by his front porch, then you are more likely to take an interest in their story and see what happens next.

I won’t cover *every* part of the beat sheet here, but you should get the idea:

The Save the Cat! beat sheet

Opening + setting up	Introducing the protagonist, setting, etc. (p.s. lots of worldbuilding happens here!)
Catalyst	Something happens that shifts the protagonist’s perception with respect to their flaw. They become more aware of it and try to fix it.
Fun and Games	In this section, which is often quite long, we explore the world/setting and the protagonist tries to fix the problem the wrong way (still quite a bit of worldbuilding going on here).
Midpoint	Something happens that raises the stakes.
Bad Guys Close In	The story flips. If things have going bad so far, there is an upward turn in the protagonist’s fortunes; if the journey so far has generally been upward, the direction here is negative (from now on, there is probably not much worldbuilding going on).
All Is Lost	The protagonist is as far as possible from reaching their goal.
Dark Night of the Soul	The protagonist hits rock bottom.
Final Acts	Something shifts; the protagonist may recall something useful and undergoes the promised transformation; battles with enemies ensue as we move towards an ending.

If you want to see the Save the Cat beat sheet in more detail, take a look here. Or buy the book here.

Jessica Brody's "ten kinds of story"?

In the second half of the book, Jessica Brody teaches the reader the beat sheet effectively, by exploring it through ten different genres that she says make up almost all the possible kinds of story out there. Of course, it’s true that many novels will contain several of these elements, e.g. people trying to solve problems and form relationships. But it’s the central focus of the novel that makes it one genre or another. I’ve listed them in the table below with an example for each.

The genres

Name	A Novel about ...	Example
Whydunnit	a secret; it usually includes someone in the role of a detective who does not change, and a dark turn that changes our perspective on the events covered	The Girl on the Train
Superhero	someone who has extraordinary powers	Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone
Dude with a Problem	a person trying to solve an immediate and usually big problem	The Hunger Games
Buddy Love	the making and breaking of a friendship or romantic relationship. ‘Will they or won’t they’ is the big question here	Twilight
Institutionalised	a character weighing up the costs of being a member of a certain institution. It usually ends in them (i) becoming a part of it (ii) getting out of it or (iii) destroying the institution	The Help
Fool Triumphant	an underdog – a fool who wins against all odds	Bridget Jones’s Diary
Out of the Bottle	a magical intervention in the protagonist’s life that serves to teach them an important lesson	A Christmas Carol
Monster in the House	overcoming a monster in a confined space (real or metaphorical – this could be a house or even the world in a movie about a pandemic). There is usually some kind of sin involved (this marks it as different from a Dude with a Problem story)	Frankenstein
Golden Fleece	a quest; a journey with obstacles on the way	Ready Player One
Rites Of Passage	a life transition. Often a coming-of-age story, but this applies to other life transitions too.	The Kite Runner

Should I use this beatsheet?

Many popular films and novels follow this structure. Brody argues that many of the most commercially successful films and novels follow the structure to the letter.

But the book contains many overblown claims. Brody suggests there is something universal (at least in Western culture) about this story structure and that all stories fit these ten genres.

Sure, the model is a useful one for new authors looking for a prescriptive approach to story writing, and the focus on increasing the tension (when the stakes are raised) in the second half of the story and letting the plot play out rather than introducing lots of new elements are good general principles to follow – they certainly helped me overcome a saggy middle when rewriting a first attempt at a novel!

But lots of satisfying, successful stories do not follow this structure, and stories can be cut and greased to fit into one of the ten categories. Indeed, there are all sorts of books written on how there are only X kinds of stories (from one story to tens of stories). But this is the kind of claim that suits good copy and is easy to market rather than being the result of deep research on the topic.

Many of Brody's themes deal with human universals like the need to belong, growing up, etc.

But what if we flip this around and view Save the Cat! as an Anglo-American cultural artefact?

Cultural anthropologists have debated story structure, too

Once upon a time (well, in 1978), the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, wrote a book called Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture. In this book, moreover, he attempted to break down myths found across the range of human societies into repeating elements that joined together, which he called mythemes. These are, for instance, like discrete musical notes on a piano that can be combined in different ways to produce different songs (stories). For the linguists among you, this idea is incredibly similar to Noam Chomsky’s claims about a universal grammar.

Yet, are grammar and narrative both hardwired into the human mind? The evidence points to a yes for grammar, but a no for narrative. This is because context can change the meaning of an element in a story much more deeply than it can change a single grammatical unit.

Yet even if Levi-Strauss’s "scientific" approach to myth has been discounted now, it still gives us an exciting methodology that can be applied to the study of myths (and other stories). In the same way that Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! beat sheets can help some new authors – but should not be seen as a universal truth or, worse, prescription about storytelling.

And sadly, some fiction content or developmental editors take a prescriptive stance, too. The book Story Grid, for instance, comes out of the same cultural milieu as Save the Cat! A milieu of Hollywood name-dropping and grand claims, which aligns with what I call hustle culture.

Flipping the Save the Cat! beat sheet

We can flip things around and say that the premise of a character-driven novel based on conflict and transformation, with an emphasis on the boundary between the protagonist’s external world (the A-story) and their internal world (the B-story) is not a human universal, but specific to commercial Anglo-American writing contexts.

Some of them (e.g. Monster in the House) even have Christian themes.

I say commercial because literary fiction does not follow these rules and should generally be edited more flexibly than genre fiction.

In other parts of the world, and outside of commercial publishing (e.g., hobbyists or people writing memoirs for family members) other traditions and blueprints exist.

For instance: can you tell a captivating story without a character arc? Yes. One good example is Indiana Jones. More details here.

Can you tell a captivating story with little conflict? Yes again! Here’s a narrative structure without conflict found in many traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean narratives.

Summary

Save the Cat! is a useful blueprint that many winning films and novels follow. But the book's claims are wildly overstated and treated as truths about storytelling. Such claims help sell more copies, but they don't respect the more complex truth that there is no blueprint for how to write a book, be it a commercially successful one or not.

Instead, there are unique storytelling and craft issues that should be tackled on a case by case basis. So beware of fiction editors telling you your story has to fit a certain template. If the inciting incident happens on page one hundred, that could certainly be a pacing issue. But it's also possible that it simply works in your story.

So while I recommend this book for new authors wanting to learn a simple model for a character arc and for managing tension and developing the plot, I think you should take this book with a big pinch of salt.

Ultimately, many different possible ways of writing a novel out there. A good novel is like a chair. There are rules about what bad chairs look like, spikes and all, but people's definition of a good chair vary widely.

And irrespective of what traditions you are working in and what hopes of commercial success you have for your book, you may want to think through alternative visions for your manuscript.

Happy writing and editing!

[Updated version of original blog post published on July 2, 2021]