Going Crazy with the Mad Protagonist

The WIP has reached that place called by Blake Snyder the Dark Night of the Soul, which (according to my reading of Save the Cat) should show up on page 205 or so of a three hundred page novel. What this means for Carina Nebula, the valiant escapee from the psychiatric hospital who has come back to Housel's Creek to clear her name and destroy her evil brother, is that she has to get sick again.

*

Depressing. But that's the whole idea, right? I've been researching various kinds of crazy, and talking to my psychiatric social worker friend, but the only way to get something credible on paper is from the inside.

One of the things the writers don't usually tell you is that they play all the characters in their books, even the nastiest characters, even the sickest. Another is that the best comedy is separated from horror by the merest hair. So I've got to write this chapter now, and it's going to make me a little strange. When I finish, though, I'll have something killingly funny.

Or maybe just killing.

I'll get back to you next week. I think.

Kate Gallison

*Photo by Melanie Orenius, http://donkeyes.blogspot.com/p/melanie.html

Never Mind the Cat

I have been forced once again to rethink my writing technique. Outlining the Work in Progress using the techniques described in Save the Cat doesn't work for me.

You will recall my boasting a couple of months ago of how I put up a board divided into three acts, as recommended by Blake Snyder, and how slickly all the events of my thriller fell into place once I started sticking 3x5 cards up on the board. You will recall how smoothly I thought everything was going.

That was before I hit fifty thousand words of the first draft and saw how everything I thought about this book was wrong, how it needed a complete overhaul. Actually that's okay. That's what second and third drafts are for. But the thing is, a novel is not a screenplay. I am not a natural plotter. The intricate wacky plots of the books I've written in the past resulted not from forethought but from getting my characters into situations that required Rube Goldberg methods to get them out. Not a plotter. What I am is a pantser.

So for all you other pantsers out there, here's the method that works best for me: Begin at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, and then stop.

Kate Gallison

The Board (From SAVE THE CAT)

One of the things that happens to writers when they surf the 'net while putting off writing is that they come across helpful advice from other writers. In a comment on one of the blog posts I was reading a few weeks ago a writer mentioned a book called Save the Cat as being a great help in plotting.

Plotting! This is generally my weak point. Any help I can get, I will take, and you must admit that Save the Cat is an irresistible title. Besides, it has a cute cover. The book is available on Kindle, for which I have an application on my Ipad, so I downloaded it eagerly. It did not disappoint.

Save the Cat is actually a book on writing screenplays by a screenwriter named Blake Snyder. Clearly I'm coming pretty late to this party, since the Save the Cat movement is all over the 'net, and Blake Snyder himself has been dead since 2009. (What!? Nooo-) You want this book, by the way. It's breezy, charming, and extremely practical. Besides recommending that you have a killer title before you even start writing, Snyder says you must have a good log line.

I don't have a good title for the first book in my new series. Hush! No Screaming in the Library doesn't cut it. I do, however, have a log line that I like:

A small-town librarian discovers a crazy homeless woman living in her library, whose secrets soon bind them together and put both their lives in danger.

Snyder says there must be a save-the-cat scene early on, where the protagonist does some act of good will and courage that will cause the audience to root for this person. I'm having my protagonist, whose name I have not yet discovered, save an actual cat, a stray cat who was a member of our household until he succumbed to kidney disease, possibly brought on by eating Chinese melamine. But I digress.

Having a general idea what your book/screenplay is about, you then begin to make notes on cards of scenes you want in it. You then arrange the cards on a storyboard, divided in four segments, with certain plot turns occurring on certain pages of your script. Things take a 180 at the midpoint, for instance. This sounds to me like something Chris Grabenstein told us at a Mystery Writers of America meeting, how there are tent poles holding up the plot. You know, I've been doing this professionally for twenty years or so. Any day now I'm going to get a handle on it.

So I took Blake Snyder's screenplay page numbers, where he indicated that certain twists must happen, and using eighth grade algebra converted them to page numbers in a 300 page manuscript. Now, don't tell me the book will be worthless because it's built on a formula. You might just as well say a sonnet is worthless. Then I put a board together over my computer, stuck all sorts of cards up on it, and sat back to view the results.

Blake Snyder would not advise me to start writing at this point, because the storyboard clearly isn't finished. Yes, I have drama, and a beginning, and an end. Sort of. But it's chaotic, as you can see. I don't care, I have to get busy and write my story. The board as it stands is a good enough guide for me.

Or possibly it's the map of a deranged mind. At any rate I'm writing.

--Kate Gallison