Accolades

They’re calling it the Save the Cat!® Beat Sheet Workbook, but I see it more as a PLAYbook—both in the sense that it provides a schematic for generating compelling, intimate stories, while also making a sometimes brutal, unwieldy process PLAYFUL and FUN. A book that can do all that has certainly earned its place on any screenwriter’s shelf.

There’s joy in TV Land! As a longtime user and fan of Save the Cat!, I’ve found Jamie Nash has shifted the focus (without losing the principles) of Blake Snyder’s groundbreaking work, creating a whole new way to look at developing television series that’s filled with insight, ingenuity, and a generous sprinkling of humor. A new must-read for newcomers to the field and veterans looking to shake up their process.

I had these amazing behaviors and anecdotes, but I didn’t have characters or story. So, I literally read Save the Cat!

All screenwriters should read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!

Writing How to Train Your Dragon, our first step was to lay out our concept according to Blake’s Beat Sheet, and from there, we laid out the detailed structure. The Board became our foundation, and we never veered from it as we felt our way through the moments of the story. I’m a big believer in Blake’s approach because everything he teaches was proven true in the years of story work I did prior to reading Save the Cat! The theories he touches upon are undeniable, universal truths of human storytelling, and Blake did us all a huge favor by putting them in a digestible form that people can immediately use and rely upon.

Blake’s genius isn’t in telling how to write movies—i.e., laying down cliched dictates of what has to happen on each page—but rather, it’s the way he teaches you how to think about writing movies.