{"id":93,"date":"2010-05-27T02:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-05-27T07:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/?p=93"},"modified":"2010-05-27T02:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-05-27T07:09:00","slug":"terminated","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/?p=93","title":{"rendered":"Terminated!"},"content":{"rendered":"

My beautiful wife just bought me Save the Cat! Strikes Back<\/em>, the last of Blake Snyder\u2019s Save the Cat!<\/em> trilogy, and it got me to thinking about the whole structure \u2018argument\u2019 again. Surely it can\u2019t be that every story has the same beats. Stories can be so different. How can every story have the same underlying structure?<\/p>\n

To help me understand more fully the importance of each beat, I\u2019m playing a little elimination game with Blake\u2019s beats. The aim of the game is to see if a beat can be eliminated without impacting the story too much \u2013 are any of the beats superfluous? Does every story need every beat?<\/p>\n

Rather than go through every beat in order, I\u2019m picking out a sample and investigating whether that particular beat is necessary or not. For those who haven’t yet read Save the Cat!<\/em> and aren’t familiar with the beats, they are listed below.<\/p>\n

1 – Opening Image; 2 – Theme Stated; 3 \u2013 Set-Up; 4 \u2013 Catalyst; 5 \u2013 Debate; 6 \u2013 Break into Two; 7 \u2013 B Story; 8 \u2013 Fun and Games; 9 \u2013 Mid-point; 10 \u2013 Bad Guys Close In; 11 \u2013 All is Lost; 12 \u2013 Dark Night of the Soul; 13 \u2013 Break into Three; 14 \u2013 Finale; 15 \u2013 Final Image.<\/p>\n

The first beat I\u2019ll 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.<\/p>\n

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So, with the Debate beat terminated (with or without extreme prejudice) what does a story lose? Next post I\u2019ll give my thoughts on the essence of the Debate beat and its contribution to a story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My beautiful wife just bought me Save the Cat! Strikes Back, the last of Blake Snyder\u2019s Save the Cat! trilogy, and it got me to thinking about the whole structure \u2018argument\u2019 again. Surely it can\u2019t be that<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[144,96,74,121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-93","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-debate","category-save-the-cat","category-screenwriting","category-structure"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=93"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/93\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=93"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=93"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/k-tock.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=93"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}