Blake Snyder’s Save The Cat! just might be the most dangerous book out there for writers.
And you should read it.
But first, you need to recognize how to harness what’s valuable in Save The Cat!, while understanding the principles that make it so potentially destructive.
Blake Snyder isn’t dangerous because he is wrong. He’s not. He’s not dangerous because his ideas about how to build a script around a great premise aren’t brilliant. They are.
Blake Snyder is dangerous because he doesn’t teach you how to be a writer. He teaches you how to be a salesperson.
Don’t throw away the baby with the bath-water. As with any screenwriting book, there are some good things to be discovered in Robert McKee’s “Story”. But there’s also a lot that can be misleading, confusing or even just plain wrong. And for young writers who take his words as gospel, McKee can pose a real danger to finding your voice, truly understanding your character, and discovering the organic structure of your screenplay.
I believe that a big part of that is because McKee teaches screenwriting from a critic’s perspective, rather than that of a writer…
