ICYMI: Story Club (Ch. 1-3)
Save the Cat Chats!
At the end of February, we had our first official chat around the Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody. If you missed the meeting, first of all, check out the March Calendar of Events, because I will be hosting a repeat event at 3pm Eastern (and — at the request of one of our members — I will be in the Zoom room one hour early at 2pm Eastern to chat, too, if that time works better for you!).
However, whether you can fit that into your schedule or not, here’s a rundown of some of the things discussed in the first meeting.
Chapters Discussed
For the first meeting, we jumped into Jessica Brody’s introduction to the entire concept of the “Save the Cat” story structure.
Chapter 1: Why Do We Care? Focuses on the characteristics of a story-worthy protagonist, who Brody calls our “hero”
Chapter 2: The Save the Cat Beat Sheet Here Brody introduces the 15 “beats” that we will be studying throughout this process. This chapter gives an incredibly deep dive on each of the beats, their motivations, where we place them, what they look like in some stories, and more.
Chapter 3: Not Your Mother’s Genres Brody defines the category titles that different stories fall into in the Save the Cat universe. As we continue through the book, these are the different “genres” we will be diving into each month — starting with “Whydunit” this month!
Big Questions Asked
Based on our reading, and our commitment Story Club moving forward, I had some “big” questions for the group during our meeting, to either answer while we were together, or at least think about while reading forward. If you are playing catch-up with the crew, these are some questions to ponder while you begin this reading:
Does this structure resonate with you and your storytelling style? Save the Cat is a very popular storytelling model, but its not the only one. It’s okay to feel like this doesn’t resonate with the story you want to tell. I was (am) curious about where each of our community members falls in this discussion. There’s no right or wrong answer to this question, but knowing your own answer will not only inform us how to tackle this book going forward, but it may also help us find the resources that will best serve you and your WIP.
Is there a particular beat that needs further exploration and'/or explanation for you? We all agreed that, in a first read-through, it was difficult to readily identify the points of confusion, I thought it was a good time to bring up the question to keep in mind as we move forward.
Do you have a WIP that you will be looking at through the Save the Cat lens during Story Club? Even if this WIP is a work-not-really-in-progress-yet, I tend to think that having a personal project in mind while learning about a new technique can be very helpful to
see if the technique resonates with your process
see if the technique elevates your project
test the technique in real time!
Have you identified your WIP’s genre? I am definitely curious about this as a facilitator of this discussion group, so I know which upcoming chapter will be most helpful for the group members participating in Story Club.
Big Question Forgotten
While I am certain there is an infinite well of topics not yet discussed, one question that jumped out at me right at the end of the meeting that I wished I asked everyone in attendance was whether or not they have identified their hero’s internal want/need based on the list provided on page 16 (in Chapter 1) of Brody’s book. Not only does this answer make for great discussion material, identifying the answer to this question is an excellent exercise to undertake for anyone working on their fiction.
Resources Shared
A couple of resources were shared during the meeting, either as a result of our discussion at the moment, or the book itself. Here are the ones I shared in the chat:
The Three Day Novel Contest
three day novel is a contest that runs on Labor Day weekend. Covid time was the one year where we had a lot of people doing nothing that weekend to commit to the contest
Popular Story Structures Summarized by Reedsy
great summary of popular structures:
Extra Novel Beat Sheets to Supplement Those in The Book
Time for You To Join The Conversation
So, as I explained at the top, I will be hosting this chat again, live on Zoom, for paid subscribers of Stop Writing Alone, on March 10th (don’t be surprised if I am wearing some Super Mario gear, as that is MAR10, or “Mario Day!” — a thing low-key celebrated in the Rivera Household). If you can’t make that chat, feel free to sound off here in the comments with your thoughts on the Story Club discussion so far.
Thanks for posting this!