Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! (StC) is an advice book for aspiring Hollywood screenwriters. First published in 2005, it’s since grown into much more.* These days, StC is taught in creative writing classes and recommended to storytellers everywhere, be they novelists, playwrights, comic writers, or even game masters. While many decry StC as everything wrong with Hollywood’s approach to stories, just as many hold it up as the best place for new writers to start.
There’s just one problem: StC can’t actually teach us storytelling. This opinion probably isn’t surprising to veteran Mythcreants readers. In the book, Snyder is open about being influenced by Syd Field and Joseph Campbell, both of whom have been on the pointy end of our critiques. If you’re new to the site and can’t understand why I would besmirch a name as hallowed as Snyder’s, I’m happy to explain!
It’s More Flash Than Substance
I don’t know much about Snyder’s skills as a screenwriter. I haven’t seen his movies or read his unproduced scripts.* What I do know is that in this book, his teaching skills leave a lot to be desired, because he’s more interested in branding than clarity. Here’s a small taste of what his terminology sounds like:
Those are certainly memorable, but only for how weird they sound. Most of StC’s terminology is like this, giving no hint to its purpose unless you have time to read a page-long anecdote. For example, would you have guessed that “Pope in the Pool” is Snyder’s rule about keeping exposition from being boring? Probably not, because the only connection is a story about how a friend of Snyder’s once kept some exposition interesting by having it delivered in a scene where the pope goes for a swim.
Even the title, Save the Cat!, requires a lot of explanation. First, Snyder has to tell us about how he likes movies that start with the hero doing something nice, a tactic he thinks has fallen out of favor. He then explains that one example of a nice thing would be saving a cat that’s stuck up a tree. It’s like a book made of memes, where the appeal is that you and your friends get them, but outsiders are super confused.
Weird terminology isn’t the only way that Snyder puts style over substance. He makes a huge deal about the famous people he’s worked with, especially Steven Spielberg. Check out this quote from later in the book:
You see, I learned this next lesson from Steven Spielberg. Personally. Oh yeah… We worked together*
To be clear, I did not add the italics, that’s what Synder wrote in his book. In isolation, I might assume that was a joke, but the book is full of similar passages. It all seems to be in service of how much he overpromises. Supposedly, reading StC will enable you to write a script that’s “as good as Lawrence of Arabia” and “will sell like Spy Kids 3-D.”
Normally, that kind of claim would be obviously absurd. But since Snyder’s worked with greats like Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Spielberg, maybe he can actually do it? Unfortunately, that’s not the case, and Snyder’s extreme reliance on his famous connections is little more than smoke and mirrors.
The Fake Genres Are Absurd
Once you get past all the famous people Snyder’s rubbed elbows with, StC’s first real foray into writing advice is to make up a bunch of new genres. This is a bad sign. Genres are fuzzy categorization tools that have little to do with the fundamentals of storytelling. Steampunk stories need compelling conflict the same way hard scifi does. Mysteries might focus on whodunit, while romances care about the love story, but both of them need a satisfying resolution.
Snyder’s not interested in any of that. He wants genres to be fundamental to storytelling, but not just any genres: special genres that only he has the clarity of vision to notice. Apparently, every movie ever made can be sorted into one of these genres:
- Monster in the House
- Golden Fleece
- Out of the Bottle
- Dude with a Problem
- Rites of Passage
- Buddy Love
- Whydunit
- The Fool Triumphant
- Institutionalized
- Superhero
It takes about five seconds to spot glaring inconsistencies. He insists that Monster in the House movies must have the characters trapped somewhere with the monster, and lists Jaws and The Exorcist as examples, neither of which feature characters trapped with a monster. In Jaws, the shark is in the water. Quint, Brody, and Hooper can leave the water any time they want. In The Exorcist, the possessed girl is stuck in a house, but the priests who try to cure her aren’t. It’s true that both sets of characters head into danger rather than away from it, but if we expand the definition that far, it would include any movie with an action plot.
That’s hardly the only issue with these genres. Snyder puts Star Wars and heist movies under the poorly defined Golden Fleece because they both… involve trying to get something valuable, maybe? I don’t know, I think Snyder just isn’t familiar with either scifi or heist stories, so he stuck them both in his miscellaneous genre. He also insists that all Buddy Love* films begin with the buddies hating each other and includes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as an example. I guess no one told him that Butch and Sundance start that movie as best friends.
We could keep poking holes in Snyder’s genres all day, but even if he’d found example films that actually matched his definitions, none of it would mean anything. You can’t make big storytelling generalizations by genre, because at that level of abstraction, all stories need roughly the same thing. They all benefit from a tense plot, characters you can get attached to, a well-themed world, etc.
Once you zoom in to the nitty-gritty level where genre actually makes a difference, there are so many caveats and exceptions that making rigid categories is pointless. This is the core problem with any book or blog that tries to give storytelling advice through the lens of genre. Understanding that is far more important than making fun of Snyder for his poor choice of example films…
…Okay just one more! In The Fool Triumphant, he says “Often, the Fool has an accomplice, an ‘insider’ who is in on the joke.” He then lists Salieri from the film Amadeus as one such accomplice, with Mozart as the “fool.” If you haven’t seen Amadeus recently, Salieri’s main action in the plot is trying to kill Mozart. Some accomplice. Snyder also has a weird section where he tries to split actors into their own genres, but then admits there are too many to list and gives up. I don’t know what to make of that.
The “Beat Sheet” Is a Pretentious Outline
If you’ve only heard of this book in passing, you might assume that saving the cat is its most important part. But according to Snyder and his enthusiasts, StC’s real core is the beat sheet. This is a set of plot points, or “beats,” that Snyder insists every good movie should have, or maybe that every good movie already has.* He’s not entirely consistent on that point, but he is clear about exactly which page number each of his points should happen on. This is also where StC gets its most heated criticism for being formulaic, and it’s not hard to see why. Look at this thing!
- Opening Image (1):
- Theme Stated (5):
- Set-up (1-10):
- Catalyst (12):
- Debate (12-25):
- Break into Two (25):
- B Story (30):
- Fun and Games (30–55):
- Midpoint (55):
- Bad Guys Close In (55–75):
- All Is Lost (75):
- Dark Night of the Soul (75–85):
- Break into Three (85):
- Finale (85-110):
- Final Image (110):
Just like Snyder’s invented genres, it’s a cakewalk to poke holes in the beat sheet. Point #2 requires a character to state the movie’s message, or as Synder calls it, the “thematic premise.” He’s very literal about this. It won’t do for a movie to show its message; a character has to say it in dialogue. And it has to happen on page five. Page four or six won’t do!
Snyder’s “debate” section is described as the hero considering whether to go on the adventure or not. This is supposed to last 10 entire pages, which usually translates to 10 minutes of screen time. Do you think that sounds boring? So does Snyder, apparently, because his first example* has a character decide their debate in only one or two minutes. His second example is from Legally Blonde, when Elle applies to law school. Except, she’s already decided to go by then. Working to get into Harvard isn’t a debate, it’s just conflict.
Some of these sections are even weirder. He describes Fun and Games as when “We take a break from the stakes of the story and see what the idea is about.” What? Why are you taking a 15-minute break from the stakes? Those are what matter! And one of his examples is Die Hard! Apparently, Bruce Willis killing his first terrorist counts as taking a break from the stakes of the story.
But by far the weirdest thing about the beat sheet is that Snyder never really makes an argument for why you need to do these things. Once you get past the anecdotes of all the famous people he’s worked with, there’s almost nothing to explain how following these plot points will make your story better.
The closest he gets is claiming that Miss Congeniality follows his beat sheet, and that movie made a lot of money.* But later, he criticizes Minority Report for having a slow opening, and that movie also made a lot of money!* So, does a movie making money mean everything about it is great, or can a movie make money despite having problems? No one knows!
Just like the Hero’s Journey before it, the beat sheet is nothing but a handful of arbitrary plot points that vaguely correspond to movies Snyder likes. Nothing in here will ensure your story has a strong throughline, a novel setting, or moving character arcs. If you have all those things, you can certainly use Synder’s creation to outline your plot, but it won’t add anything that you didn’t bring yourself.
Snyder Doesn’t Understand His Ideas
Snyder’s fake genres and much-trumpeted beat sheet feel like something an unprepared student would make up to get through a test they hadn’t studied for. There’s no substance anywhere, just a bunch of grandiose claims that collapse under the slightest scrutiny.
However, that’s not to say Snyder has nothing more robust up his sleeve. Both before and after those sections, he introduces several ideas that at least come close to some genuine aspect of storytelling. The problem is that he’s not interested in thinking about his ideas in any depth, so the results are stilted and half formed. Storytellers who follow his advice will probably end up with less-than-optimal results, unless they can fill in the areas that Snyder leaves blank.
An early example is his focus on the “logline,” a one- or two-sentence pitch that’s supposed to communicate what a movie is about. Occasionally, he talks about the logline the same way we talk about throughlines, as the core conflict that makes the story work. Then, he backslides and describes it more like a premise. For example, he has a logline about a dysfunctional family getting superpowers. That’s neat, but it doesn’t define what the story is about. That premise could lead to a comedy where the superpowers turn the family tension up to 11, or it could be the setup for the family coming together to save Earth.
In the third chapter,* Snyder lays down the law that all movies must have a single main character. Here, he’s touching on the idea that it’s easier to build attachment to a single protagonist if we spend more time with them. But because he doesn’t understand attachment, he states it as an arbitrary rule. Eventually, he remembers that ensemble films exist, and his solution is for the writer to just pick one character and declare them the protagonist.
He does this with stakes and motivations too. He knows that a story should have compelling stakes, but he doesn’t know what those are. Instead, he goes with the “primal urge,” which he defines as “Survival, hunger, sex, protection of loved ones, fear of death.” Not only is he repeating himself a few times,* but he’s excluding a huge number of powerful motivations. You might think it’s compelling to watch three Black women fight for recognition in the early space program, but no one’s in danger of dying in that story, so actually you’re very bored.
This pattern repeats again and again, especially when Snyder gets to his Immutable Laws of Screenplay Physics. Some of these are better than others, and he actually manages a decent explanation of likability at one point, but most of it is poor understanding after poor understanding. To be fair, I’m writing 17 years after Snyder did, so maybe one day someone will say the same thing about Mythcreants. But nothing in Snyder’s book suggests he’s even trying to better understand stories. He’s got it figured out, and if you can’t follow his advice, that’s a you problem.
The Rest Is Process Advice
While much of StC is filled with bad storytelling advice, just as much has nothing to do with storytelling at all. Instead, it’s the dreaded process advice. Rather than saying what needs to be in a story, Snyder tells us how we should go about getting the words on paper.
Chapter five is literally nothing but process advice. Snyder spends it explaining how to visualize his beat sheet using exactly 40 index cards. Like all process advice, this won’t help if you don’t know what your story is yet, and it might not help even if you do. The writing process is personal, and index cards are no more valid than jotting down notes in marble folders or a word processor. Snyder’s process will undoubtedly work for some writers, but it isn’t what most of us need from a book on writing.
On the bright side, at least chapter five doesn’t pretend to be something it’s not. The beat sheet itself is effectively process advice, since it doesn’t actually teach you how to write a script, just a fancy method for outlining. That’s not exactly what Snyder promised when he said we could write the next Lawrence of Arabia.
Many of Snyder’s weirder storytelling tips also turn out to be process advice. If you follow his logline section to the end, you’ll discover that it’s mostly about pitching your story to an agent or producer. This is actually important, and most fiction writers will need to do it eventually, whether they work in Hollywood or not. But it’s not the foundation of a story the way Snyder thinks it is, and skipping directly to the pitch can leave you without any clue of where to go next.
By far the funniest example of process advice in StC is the section on made-up genres. After an entire chapter of inventing arbitrary categories and insisting that he’s just documenting a natural phenomenon, Snyder finally gets to the point: you should watch movies that are similar to what you want to write and get inspiration from them. Sure, that could be helpful for someone who’s stumped about how monster movies work, but I don’t think we needed 26 pages of evangelizing to understand it.
There’s also a fair amount of Hollywood business advice, and I have no reason to doubt its efficacy.* People tend to be much better at the concrete details of navigating their chosen profession than the abstract brain teaser that is storytelling. Other than that, Snyder’s process advice is at best unremarkable and at worst actively deceptive.
Save the Cat! is often derided as formulaic, but that isn’t accurate. A formula would be something you could input an idea into and reliably get a story at the other end, even if it was similar to every other story made this way. StC does not understand storytelling well enough to work like that. The best it can do is add a bunch of arbitrary requirements to someone who already knows how to write a story.
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Save the Cat! sounds pretty terrible (yeesh, I don’t even like exclamation marks at the end of a sentence).
Have you ever read The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne? I was into it for a while but really struggled to apply it to my own story and couldn’t figure out why. Then I started reading Mythcreants and realised that it wasn’t me, it was that The Story Grid… wasn’t helpful.
I read quite a few books about writing at one point and I can’t name one useful thing I learned from any of them – although I did enjoy Ray Bradbury’s anecdote about how he wrote Fahrenheit 451. That dude was driven.
I haven’t read the book, but I’m familiar with the Story Grid website. Their genre leaf clover looks fancy, even if the sheer number of invented subgenres clogs it up.
At least they admit that there authors like Rowling, King, or Gaiman who didn’t follow their grid at all, only to backtrack by saying something like “Rowling got rejected for twenty years, do you want to end like that? No? Then follow my story grid!”
Yeah, got confused by the Story Grid genre thing too. Now they’ve even got their own version of the hero’s journey. But on Mythcreants, things are so much clearer.
It does look fancy but it’s confusing and inconsistent. They don’t consider science fiction a genre but a setting. That makes sense as far as it goes since you could pin down the structure of, say, a mystery story easily, whereas a science fiction story could be about almost anything. The trouble is, they then include westerns as a genre and westerns are all about the setting.
The “Western” in the storygrid genres also includes Samurai flicks, so it’s not really about the setting with their definition.
There’s actually been a great deal of mutual influence between the type of Samurai film set in isolated settings in rural Japan and the American Western.
Both are likely to have some injustice in town and a wandering hero who comes in and takes care of the bad guys, often with a bit of celebration or critique or both of the respective culture’s view of masculinity and violence.
The Zatoichi series of films feel like episodes of a Western, but in Japan.
Samurai films set in cities or during open war between feudal lords don’t usually have this dynamic.
In fact, there’s at least one famous example of a western that’s an outright remake of a samurai film: The Magnificent Seven (the original), being a remake of the film Seven Samurai.
One could argue that Samurai flicks and Westerns share a basic setting of a ‘lawless’ place – the Japan shown in your regular Samurai flick setting is during a time when a lot of local rulers were in constant battle and the regular people were hardly protected, when Ronin (aka masterless Samurai) were roaming the area and most of them were bandits rather than heroes (and the lawlessness might be played up a bit, too). That does have quite some similarities to the wild west as it is presented in fiction.
Rowling didn’t get rejected for twenty years, she got rejected by 18 publishing houses and published by the 19th.
The process took less than 2 years, the way she used to tell it.
There’s probably a lesson in that for all aspiring writers. 18 publishing firms who are looking for “the next big thing” passing on it, without so much as an offer to work on the manuscript with her and improve it, and then the 19th making wild bank for over a decade on that same manuscript. I’m sure Rowling worked on it and improved it between submissions, but she never got a “needs work”, she just got a “bugger off”.
If I was her, I’d drop the transphobic campaigning and just keep sending those 18 publishers reminders of their rejection on each anniversary. Just to remind them they’re crap at their jobs.
I’ve had a look at a large number of books on writing – both for process advice and other – and found that it’s pretty hard to follow them. You can take some tips away from them, something which works for you as it did for the author writing the book in question, but you can usually not 1:1 use the advice from another person. Everyone writes differently – and writing process also can change over time. I started out as a discovery writer and am doing a lot of plotting now (which, admittedly, makes it easier to pull through a plotted book to get the first draft out).
My suggestion is to take such books as something to look into, not something to follow like a holy book.
Agreed. Even holy books aren’t followed to the letter by most people.
The best writing advice I’ve read to date is Chris’ article about fractals.
Yeah, that one is pretty useful, because it helps with plotting from the big to the small details. It’s all fractals, after all.
I’ve found that aspect A from this book works, aspect B from that book does, and aspect C from a third. Yet, trying to follow the process advice from just one book has never really worked for me.
To answer Anthony’s original question, I’m aware of Storygrid and it’s also pretty silly.
Like Snyder, Coyne makes up a bunch of fake genres, and for largely the same reason: They want to give plotting advice by genre, when genres don’t work that way. So Coyne makes up a bunch of new genres to fit his various plot types, but even that is super arbitrary and doesn’t actually fit how plots work.
Storygrid also has this weird idea that the story’s mood or emotion *has* to completely reverse by the end of each scene, which it calls “Polarity Shift.” Of course it is common for the mood, emotions, and tone to make big changes in a story, that’s part of the drama, but claiming that it needs to do a 180 in EVERY scene is bizarre.
The book offers very little guidance on *how* to or why to make those changes, so if you follow they’re advice, you’ll just end up with a story that’s wildly uneven, where characters completely change their outlook for no reason.
The main reason I haven’t written anything about Storygrid is honestly, I don’t want to give it more attention. Save the Cat is so well known that my writing about it won’t matter much, but with Storygrid there’s a good chance I would just be giving them free advertising. That might change in the future though.
Very insightful. I do however would have been interested, if the “Save the Cat! Writes a Novel” by Jessica Brody is any better.
Also, please do “Story Engineering” by Larry Brooks next. I just can’t with this book.
There’s definitely an article on Brody’s book coming! It’s just much longer than the original, so it’ll take a little longer.
I’d be interested to hear the Mythcreants’ thoughts on the “Writing Excuses” podcast by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal et al.
It was a little odd to hear Mythcreants talk about ensemble stories as viable, because I was under the impression that you guys had also said in the past that stories were better with a single main character. Was I mistaken?
Ensembles are much easier and more common in film or TV than in books, because they don’t suffer from the problem of reduced engagement in the same way that books often can and don’t have exactly the same problem with different narrators. The Mythcreants advice about this has to do with viewpoints when writing, and the fact that it so often leads to divergent stories within the same work, not the number of characters.
For something like a heist you outright need an ensemble most of the time.
Adam’s right that ensemble pieces tend to work better in tv and movies, because you don’t have the same problems with shifting point of view that you do in a narrated work.
But more fundamentally, it’s about tradeoffs. Having a single main character makes it easier to build attachment to that character, and in *most* cases, that’s what a writer wants. However, there are also cases where a true ensemble cast works better, like if you want the story to be about a ship’s crew rather than just the captain.
In those scenarios, it can be worth sacrificing some attachment to get the effect you want. Snyder doesn’t understand this tradeoff.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks to both of you for replying!
I felt like I was reading about an AI trying to figure out how writing works.
LOL!
I think the most useful thing about Save the Cat is the whole save the cat tip about building likeability for the protagonist. I think it has a catchy title that makes sense and is a useful tip. I was unpleasantly surprised when I read the book and this was the one bit of advice I felt was good.
Snyder fundamentally misunderstood Akira Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai”.
In that movie, one of the samurai goes to rescue a kidnapped boy. In order to do this, he cuts off his topknot, the symbol (and physical locus) of a samurai’s station, honor and skill. Every time a samurai is defeated, his topknot is severed by the victor, making the samurai piblically shamed. This samurai does it to himself willingly to be able to disguise himself as a nobody and get close enough to rescue the boy without risking the child killed.
This is a big sacrifice on the part of the samurai, since it marks him publicly as a loser and not a real samurai. This action bears great consequences for him during the movie and it is the whole point of characterising the samurai, plainly stating to the audience that he values innocent lives far more than his reputation and the year he’ll spend dishonired until he can grow his hair out again.
Blake Snyder’s advice is, explicitly, to introduce the lead character doing a good deed offhand, with no consequence for them this way or that.
I can write a hundred-page essay on how big a fail this piece of… “advice” really is.
I’ll just say, if the lead suffers a consequence for doing a good deed, even if it’s a small, silly consequence, like being late for school and losing the perfect attendance trophy for the year – that carries far more weight than if the lead is introduced by pushing the crosswalk button for a person with arms full of groceries. Yup, that’s a nice thing to do, polite and helpful, but it’s no skin off their nose and is just bland and nothing of particular note.
The weight of a good deed in the audience’s minds is measured by the sacrifice made to achieve it.
The problem is, you run the risk of making the protagonist nothing but a punching bag.
The reason the sacrifice works in “Seven Samurai” (full disclosure, haven’t seen the movie, I’m going off what you said) is that the sacrifice was meaningful AND necessary to achieve the result. If the protagonist merely gets beat up for no reason other than that they do something nice it’s no longer a sacrifice, it’s simply torture.
And the introduction may not be the best place to show the person willing to sacrifice for others. It may be a good place to show the opposite, in fact–show the school kid refusing to hold the door for the elderly gentleman with his arms full of groceries, so that he can be on time for school. Then show the kid growing throughout the story, and toward the end have a similar situation call back to that one, but this time the kid holds the door open. Alternatively, have the kid hold the door open, have the principle ask why he’s late, have the kid explain, and have everyone act like reasonable, rational people, to show that this is a world where people understand that sometimes things happen and rules aren’t meant to be rigidly adhered to….
I’m reading a book now where the main character is introduced giving away some bread, which he “earned” due to finding gemstones in a mine. There were no real negative consequences–he’d already eaten part of his extra ration–but there didn’t need to be; the rest was so bad that any extra consequences quite probably would have killed the character (references to such deaths were made on the same page, a little later).
In the end it’ll depend on what type of story you’re going to tell. Having everyone act reasonable is a good way to start a low-stakes mystery or coming of age story; having the character help out with little consequences sets them up for a fall later; having them start so bad that they can only improve or die is a good way to set up a fish-out-of-water story. It all depends. Characterization doesn’t have to be super-deep, especially in the beginning (where you could just as easily be characterizing the setting as the characters).
I would disagree that the good deed needs a sacrifice to accompany it.
In Star Wars Episode IV A New Hope, Luke Skywalker cares about the feelings of droids and makes friends easily.
These only loosely involve a “penalty”.
Similarly in The Great Escape, Henley’s remorse about blackmailing Werner signals that he at least has some kind of conscience.
These are not about sacrifice. Rather, they’re about giving the audience a chance to make an emotional connection to the character.
When I watched Star Wars: Rogue One, I remember thinking to myself; “If this was the first Star Wars movie a person were to see, there’s nothing here to convince them that the Rebels are the good guys.”
There’s two keys to cinema.
Sell the stakes.
Give the audience a hero that they can root for.
And if you’re rooting for “rescues cats from trees” or “presses the elevator button for the guy with-groceries-in-both-arms”, it’s better than having nothing.
While the book doesn’t sound very good, I’d like to skim a copy to see more examples of his genres. “The Fool Triumphant” sounds fun.
Do chuck wendig’s 1001 ways to be a kick ass writer next
The part about genres totally reminded me of the Five Tips for Giving Useless Writing Advice article, especifically point 3 “be a genre prescriptivist”. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was at least partially influenced by Save The Cat.
Yeesh, the StC! sounds even worse than I thought. For some reason I don’t remember anymore, I stayed away from this book even when it was recommended to us in the movie school.
Tbh, I like reading writing advice books mostly because they motivate me to write, even if they don’t really have much new information
I now know that Save The Cat! is a reference to Snyder’s homebrew writing terms but when I initially encountered the book I thought the title was a reference to some combination of Chekov’s Gun and Schrodinger’s Cat, in which a cat that may or may not be alive in the first act must be shot with a gun in the third.
IIUC, there’s an axiom in Hollywood that if you kill the dog; your movie will fail to make back its cost.
I suspect the title was a reworking of that.
So, how badly did “John Wick” fail?
Audiences might make allowances when everyone involved with the dog’s death is massacred throughout the rest of the film.
Hey Oren.
Just out of curiosity, do you recommend any writing books?
Also, what do you write? Novels? Screenplays? I’d love to read one. Thanks!
Unfortunately, I haven’t encountered much writing advice in the wild that I can recommend. The Writing Excuses podcast can at least give you a look into the world of being a professional author, though like a lot of authors, they often don’t know what it is that’s made them successful. Ironically, the best storytelling critique I can recommend is the Pitch Meeting youtube series by Ryan George.
If you want to see some of my fiction, we have a few short stories on the site. They’re nothing special though, I’m much more of an editor than a writer.
Are there any resources with writing exercises, intended to work on a single aspect of wordcraft or storytelling at a time ? They’re used to learn every skill from mathematics to drawing, but there seems to be a strange dearth of them in the writing field. The closer I’ve seen are the prompt included at the end of each Writing Excuses podcast, but they seem designed to give inspiration rather than practice a given technique.
They’d be nice to have when I don’t have the time or energy to work on a full story but want to keep practicing my writing nonetheless.
Hmm. If I knew of any, I’d love to recommend them. The closest we have to exercises like that is probably Chris’s description makeover posts.
We have just a few posts with writing exercises. I haven’t written more because I don’t think they’re very popular.
https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-exercises-for-stronger-narrative-personality/
https://mythcreants.com/blog/ten-quick-style-101-exercises/
I’m started to work on writing courses though, and those will include some structured practice.
Thank you, I’d forgotten the exercises for stronger character voice. I tried them once, but it might be good to do them again as character voice is a weakness of mine.
I had missed the article with the 10 other exercises, and they seem absolutely perfect for practicing the basics. I’ll give them a try.
Courses with structured practice would be great ! I’m looking forward to it.