Like many authors, we rely on key resources to guide our writing. These works vary considerably in content and style, and they cover just about everything from plot planning to describing the nuances inherent in specific emotional reactions.
Blake Snyder’s, Save the Cat, remains one of our favourite resources in this regard, an invaluable book about screenwriting and screenplays, as well as works of fiction. We have perused it more times than we care to count and, each time, we come away with something different. As an aside, if you’ve never read this book, we highly recommend it. We’d also highly recommend Robert McKee’s Story, a classic in this vein.
Save the Cat contains a number of “ironclad” rules for writing screenplays, all designed to make a story more marketable and satisfying to the reader. In the archetypal “save the cat” scene, a character, often a despicable one or the hero, does something endearing to make him or her more likable to the audience. This typically occurs early in a story.
In our novel, Love Decanted, Julie, one of the main characters, has a “save the cat” moment in the first scene when, during a simmering discussion with her overbearing mother, her 5-year-old niece, Gaby, arrives. Not only does Julie take the opportunity to embrace Gaby, she agrees to help her sister-in-law out by agreeing to watch Gaby for the night, thereby putting an end to her mother’s rant. This shows Julie in a different light, and it demonstrates some of her many positive qualities.
Another Love Decanted “save the cat” moment occurred behind the scenes. This one had a very different purpose, and it consisted of us resurrecting a rather innocent-looking calico cat from the cutting room floor. If your eyebrow just furrowed, or you just scratched your head, or you started purring, just bear with us for a sec…
The impetus for Love Decanted stems from an email about a cat we encountered in the Saint-Émilion lower town square—a true story, by the way. As another aside, if you’ve never seen this stunning, medieval French village in the heart of the greater Bordeaux wine region, we also highly recommend you take a look because words cannot do it justice. If you spot an enormous horse chestnut tree in the middle of a quaint, cobblestone square, you’ve found the right place.
Without giving too much away about our novel, the cat makes a cameo appearance, just like it did when we visited Saint-Émilion a few years back. In Love Decanted, it leaves Julie and Peter, the novel’s other main character, laughing to the point of tears. The calico later causes a frenetic commotion after leaping on a dinner table and helping itself to a piece of steak. Let’s just say a few people lost their appetite that night.
Because of the cat’s significance to the story’s origin, we included it in one of the original scenes. Over time, however, through a series of major revisions and rewrites, we wound up “killing our darling,” so to speak, while reorganizing the text. As a by-product, the prized feline had to cash in one of its nine lives.
As more time passed and we continued to work through additional revisions—we’re now up to 8 major revisions of the entire manuscript, which, as we’ve come to learn, is par for the course—we kept talking about the cat to anyone and everyone who showed an interest in our novel. The distinguished calico cat kept coming up in conversation, mainly because we weren’t ready to let it go, apparently. Anyway, this evoked a range of reactions in other people, which took the form of amusement at the mild end and astonishment at the other. It also evoked plenty of laughter. What other reason did we need to resurrect the cat and cast it back into our book?
If you’d like to meet the cherished feline and see what really happened on that fateful night in Saint-Émilion, you’ll have to read Love Decanted. There’s only one glitch. We just need to publish the novel first! So, stay tuned…