How To Outline A Story

Summary of "Save the Cat" by Blake Snyder

C.S.M.

May 22, 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 4:

Blake Snyder recommends a visual approach for outlining a story.

He uses The Board.

The goal is to visually organize the scenes in your story and easily be able to move them around.

You could use pin notecards to a big corkboard— or just fill out the beats in a notebook with a pen.

The Board lets you plan your story before you actually start writing it.

It’s easier to fix story issues by shuffling beats around on index cards than doing major surgery on a manuscript.

It’s a pressure free zone and you’re allowing your story to seep into your subconscious.

You don’t even have to follow your outline once the actual writing begins. The characters may want to move in a different direction.

Here’s how to outline a story using The Board:

1. How to set up The Board:

Divide your Board into four equal rows:

Then add the hinge points of your story:

Act 1 break
Midpoint
Act 2 break

This gives you a good base to then add the other scenes in your story.

You can even place the other beats of your story at the start of the process to give you a path to follow.

2. What goes on each index card:

Each card represents a scene— or you could just write all this in a notebook.

a. Heading

Is it an interior or exterior?

Is it a sequence of scenes like a chase that covers several locations?

b. Basic Action

Each card should also include the basic action of the scene told in simple declarative sentences.

c. +/-

+/- denotes the emotional change you must execute in each scene.

Think of a scene as a mini-movie. It must have a beginning, middle, and an end.

A scene must have something happen that causes the emotional tone to change drastically either from + to - or from - to + just like the opening and final images of story.

This is helpful in weeding out weak scenes or nailing down the very real need for something definite to happen in each one.

Example: At the beginning of a scene your hero is feeling cocky. He’s a lawyer and he’s just won a big case. Then his wife enters with news. Now that the case is over, she wants a divorse. What started as a + emotionally for your hero is now a - emotionally.

An emotional change like this must occur in every scene. And if you don’t have it, you don’t know what the scene is about.

d. > <

> < denotes the conflict in the scene.

Think of conflict in a scene like this: As the lights come up, two people walk into a room from opposite doors, meet in the middle, and begin to struggle past each other to reach the door on the other side. They each enter the scene with a goal and standing in their way is an obstacle. That’s conflict.

Conflict must be foremost on your mind when you conceive each scene.

The basics set-ups you learned in high school English class can all be applied here:

Man vs. Man
Man vs. Nature
Man vs. Society

You must know what the main conflict of that scene is.

Each person, or entity, has an agenda. What is it?

The > < symbol on the bottom of each card must be filled in with who each of the players is in each scene of conflict, what the issue is, and who wins by the end.

Blake Snyder recommends only one conflict per scene. One is plenty. If it’s more than one person or issue, you’ve got a muddy conflict.

If you can’t find a conflict, figure out a way to create one.

Final Thoughts:

All of this is intended to save you time. It’s a lot easier to see and move cards around on a board than passages of your on writing that you’ve already fallen in love with.

Blake Snyder recommends forty cards/scenes in a story. That’s about 10 per row. Most likely you will have more than you need and need to examine each beat and see if the action can be folded into another place.

You may break away from your outline as you actually start writing. But outlining with The Board gives you “islands in a sea of uncertainty.”

Continue reading the other parts my Save The Cat summary: