Terminated!

My beautiful wife just bought me Save the Cat! Strikes Back, the last of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! trilogy, and it got me to thinking about the whole structure ‘argument’ again. Surely it can’t be that every story has the same beats. Stories can be so different. How can every story have the same underlying structure?

To help me understand more fully the importance of each beat, I’m playing a little elimination game with Blake’s beats. The aim of the game is to see if a beat can be eliminated without impacting the story too much – are any of the beats superfluous? Does every story need every beat?

Rather than go through every beat in order, I’m picking out a sample and investigating whether that particular beat is necessary or not. For those who haven’t yet read Save the Cat! and aren’t familiar with the beats, they are listed below.

1 – Opening Image; 2 – Theme Stated; 3 – Set-Up; 4 – Catalyst; 5 – Debate; 6 – Break into Two; 7 – B Story; 8 – Fun and Games; 9 – Mid-point; 10 – Bad Guys Close In; 11 – All is Lost; 12 – Dark Night of the Soul; 13 – Break into Three; 14 – Finale; 15 – Final Image.

The first beat I’ll be investigating is lucky number 5, the Debate section. I selected this first because it is the one I forgot to include when I was listing out the beats from memory. I want to see how pivotal it really is, given that it is the one that I found the easiest to forget.

So, with the Debate beat terminated (with or without extreme prejudice) what does a story lose? Next post I’ll give my thoughts on the essence of the Debate beat and its contribution to a story.

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