Saturday, October 1, 2022

Save the Cat as a Design Template

Following our analogy between writing software and writing stories, we can gain additional insights by exploring the use of design templates. 

Back in the early days of information systems development, say the early1970's, nearly all software was written a line at a time using a programming language like COBOL, P/L1 or C.  Over time developers realized that certain functions such as a sort routine or a mathematical function were being written over and over again, by each programmer who needed them, leading to a great variation in software reliability and added expense due to the enormous duplication of effort. Eventually, these common functions were collected in software libraries. Fast forward to today and one of the most popular programming languages, called Python, allows software developers to do a small amount of traditional programming while pulling the vast majority of needed functionality from existing libraries. I hope I haven't gone into too much technical detail here. But, I wanted to show how you can go from writing everything from scratch to assembling it from existing reusable components. And I wanted to show this because the same thing is possible for writing stories.

There are simple templates for writing stories that provide heuristics for the major components of the story such as: You want the reader to be able to identify with the protagonist. All primary characters must be believable people. You must keep the reader interested by revealing the plot in a way as to keep their attention. And so on. And while those are helpful, they leave a lot for the writer to do. This is not a bad thing, as the writer should be contributing a lot to the story. But, there are stories written for different purposes. I mean no disrespect by saying that there are junk food stories to satisfy some readers who want entertainment and emotional stimulation. And there are haute cuisine stories for people who are looking for something deeper and more satisfying. For junk food stories, it is way too much effort to write them from scratch, and more sophisticated templates are needed to leverage the writing process.

There is already at least one reusable template for a story which is widely used. It is called Save the Cat by Blake Snyder, and it was introduced for screenwriting. It focuses on movie and TV scripts but has been applied to novels and other story vehicles as well. Having a template like Save the Cat provides several benefits. It provides a structure for writers so they don't have to develop their ideas from scratch. It provides a template to facilitate the evaluation of scripts so the people who buy scripts can go through them more quickly. And, it provides the audience with what they are expecting.  

The Save the Cat template is extremely popular at present and its advocates make it sound as though anyone who does not follow it will never get any scripts accepted or novels published. This may very well be true for the popular market but there are two additional things that one must consider. First, not all writing targets the popular market. Some writers wish to achieve something different, perhaps more literary. Perhaps they want to try something more novel, no pun intended. Maybe they want to tackle one of Jane Austen's novels in the style of Henry James. Maybe they just want to write what they want to write, popular markets be damned. 

The second problem with the popular market is that it is fickle. If you followed television from the middle of the 20th century you would see detective stories, followed by cowboy stories, followed by stories about hip socially aware characters. When detective stories rule, just try to get a cowboy script published. As a thought experiment imagine trying to get a popular show from the 1950's accepted in the 1970's, or vice versa. Would the Beverly Hillbillies sell today? Would All in the Family have attracted an audience in the 1950's? 

The problem with chasing popular tastes is that popular tastes change. And if the only thing you know how to do is target current popular taste, then you are in deep weeds when tastes change. Imagine trying to sell a script that does not provide the audience with a satisfying ending. What if the last episode just fades to black? Oh, wait, is that what the Sopranos did? Yeah, it worked well for that show. But, I doubt that many other shows will follow suit.

For those who find the use of templates repugnant for quality stories because it constrains the writers creativity, I would respectfully suggest that the writer can put their creativity into the parts of the story that can benefit from it the most while tweaking existing templates for elements that are less important. No point in reinventing the wheel in different shapes and colors when you can put that energy into new ways to use the wheel.

The point here is that templates provide some amazing benefits while also introducing some significant risks. But, what if there were numerous templates and one could choose the parameters of the story they are trying to write, feed them into a piece of software and let the software generate the script. Let's take this  a step further and say that the software is intelligent and it can figure out what needs to be and then does it. Hmmm.. this is starting to sound like artificial intelligence writing stories. Is that possible? Well, just wait till the next post.