3 Storytelling Tricks That Will Level-Up Your Writing

Summary of "Save the Cat" by Blake Snyder

C.S.M.

May 01, 2024

📚 Save The Cat is a best-selling book on storytelling.

🕒 Save time by reading my comprehensive summary.

✍️ You'll discover techniques for crafting a compelling story.

My summary is broken into four posts:

Part 1: 3 storytelling tricks that will level-up your writing
Part 2: How to write a logline
Part 3: The 15 beats of a story
Part 4: How to outline a story

Here is Part 1:

Save The Cat is filled with tips and tricks for improving your stories.

Some of them have really stuck with me, and I’ve seen them used effectively across all forms of storyelling.

Blake Snyder argues that crafting a story is a science as much as an art— and it's amazing how much your stories can improve once you learn a few things.

Here are 3 storytelling tricks that will level-up your writing:

1. Save The Cat

The Save the Cat rule says: “The hero has to do something then we meet him so that we like him and want him to win.”

Saving a cat from a tree would be an extreme example, but the idea is to get the audience ‘in sync’ with the plight of the hero from the start.

Think of the first scene from Disney’s Aladdin: The hero steals a piece of bread from a street vendor, but ends up giving the food to a hungry child.

You could also show off a likeable aspect of a character’s personality.

The main characters in Pulp Fiction are on their way to kill someone in the first scene. Despite this, the audience is still ‘in sync’ with them because Quentin Tarantino makes them funny. And we typically like people who are funny.

2. The Pope in the Pool

The goal of the “Pope in the Pool” technique is to add to add an element to any exposition-heavy scene that holds the reader’s attention.

Exposition - Backstory or details of the plot that must be told to the reader in order for them to understand what happens next.

The Pope in the Pool technique derives its name from the script for The Plot to Kill the Pope by George Englund. It contains a scene with lots of exposition that is written in a way that holds the reader’s attention.

Instead of merely divulging the necessary details of the plot through dialogue alone, the scene takes place at the Vatican pool where the Pope swims laps back and forth.

The reader isn’t left bored while the dialogue unfolds, but is instead thinking:

“I didn’t know the Vatican had a swimming pool?!”

“And look, the Pope’s not wearing his Pope clothes… he’s… he’s… in his bathing suit!”

Drips Example:

Blake Snyder gives another example of the “Pope in the Pool” technique from his Drips script.

The two main characters have an ice-tea drinking competition right before the exposition-heavy scene where the Bad Guy lays out the plot of the film.

By the time the scene begins, the two main characters really need to go to the bathroom. The reader is engaged by the humor that comes from the two characters sitting there, legs crossed, trying to concentrate on the Bad Guy’s speech while the world around them ratchets up their need to hit the bathroom.

A girl pours a tall glass of iced tea…

Sprinklers turn on outside the window…

A neighbor’s dog pees in a bush…

The exposition gets across to the reader… and the scene is hilarious.

3. A Limp And An Eye Patch

This a trick to help your minor characters stick out— you don’t want readers to be confused about who is who.

Make sure every character has “A Limp and an Eyepatch.”

Give every character something memorable so they stick in your readers’ minds.

A running visual reminder makes it easier to remember a character.

Continue reading the other parts my Save The Cat summary: