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My book club swore by that "save the cat" beat sheet
Marissa from our Denver group insisted I follow Blake Snyder's beat sheet exactly for my novel. I thought she was nuts, but I gave it a shot. Finished my first draft in 8 weeks flat. Plot actually held together. Anyone else had a writing formula that surprised you?
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colegarcia5d ago
Double down on what the_rose said. I think most pro writers who act like they're just vomiting pure genius onto the page are full of it. You look at the structure of any bestseller or hit movie and it's basically the same skeleton underneath all the fancy dressing. Formulas are just shortcuts for stuff that already works, like using a recipe instead of guessing how much flour to throw in the bowl.
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My buddy in college once wrote a 300-page screenplay using a formula he found on a pizza box. It was terrible, but hey, it had structure. I tried that beat sheet method once and ended up with a romance novel where my cat was the love interest. Formula works until it doesn't, I guess.
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the_rose5d ago
I read somewhere that a lot of famous writers actually used formulas and just didn't talk about it. If it got your first draft done in 8 weeks, who cares if it's a formula?
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Man, that's wild you bring that up. I remember back in high school, my buddy swore he could write a country song by plugging in words to a template he found online. He wrote three songs in a weekend, and one of them actually got played at a local bar. Nobody cared how he did it, they just liked the tune. So I figure, if a formula gets the job done and it's good enough, why knock it? Results matter more than the method in my book.
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