Probably the best book I’ve ever come across on the subject of structure, Save the Cat is the book you need if you want to write fiction of any variety.
Although designed as a tool for scriptwriters, most of the information works just as well for novels, and a lot of it could, and probably should, be applied to short stories.
It’s not about the nitty gritty stuff like punctuation, grammar or formatting – it’s about what goes where in your story and why. Think The Hero’s Journey made clear and concise. It’s very easy to read and simple to refer back to.
No matter how much you might like to avoid the subject of structure, your story needs more than just a beginning, middle and end.
Believe it or not, those broad categories actually have to do something – readers expect certain things from a story – and if you don’t give it to them, they’ll walk away feeling as if something wasn’t quite working.
Save the Cat teaches you what each part requires and how to make it all work together.
The most useful thing Save the Cat taught me was how to answer to the simplest, most basic question you need to ask before you start writing – What’s the story about?
There’s a pretty simple reason Snyder promotes discovering the answer to this question.
Have you ever taken a thought, concept, image or idea and just ran with it?
Unless you get really lucky, it’s hard to edit ‘freewritten’ stories after the fact. Even with the story on the page, you probably still haven’t defined what it’s actually about.
Save the Cat will explain how to distill your story into a single sentence, and that’s just the start of what it will do for you.
Highly recommended.