Writer of things that go bump in the night

Saving the Cat from Itself: On Deconstructing “Game of Thrones” and a Troubling Pattern of Misanalysis

Ah, Save the Cat!—the screenwriting manual some swear by… while others forswear altogether.  Here are my thoughts on why it is a worthy—even indispensable—storytelling program that has been irreparably corrupted by the very people who teach it.


The folks over at Save the Cat!, which does not include the program’s late innovator Blake Snyder, offered an object lesson last week on the misapplication of craft.

It’s common practice for Save the Cat! to break down a current or classic movie and illustrate how it conforms to a story’s fifteen major narrative “beats” as Snyder identified them (Blake himself published an entire book dedicated to this skill-building exercise, which I recommend—certainly over any of the recent analyses on the STC! blog).  This is what a sample “beat sheet” (of my own authorship) would look like (click on it for a closer look):

A "Save the Cat!" breakdown of "Raiders of the Lost Ark"
A “Save the Cat!” breakdown of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”

Simple enough, right?  The entire story summarized at its most basic, macrostructural level.  That’s the kind of plot overview I’ll painstakingly compose before I begin Word One of my screenplay or novel, so I know the plot is always tracking in the right direction.  It’s an indispensable application to help a writer “break the back” of his story, as well as an excellent learning tool:  By reverse-engineering well-regarded movies, you can teach yourself the fundamentals of mythic structure.  That is ostensibly the reason Save the Cat! offers sample deconstructions on a near-weekly basis.

As part of the exercise, Save the Cat! assigns its cinematic subject a genre per Snyder’s codified classifications (you’ll notice I designated Raiders an “Epic Fleece”), but, quite frankly, the Cats are usually confoundingly off the mark:  In the last year alone, they’ve misidentified Brooklyn (for the record, it’s “Family Institution”), The Empire Strikes Back (“Fantasy Superhero”), Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (“Caper Fleece”), Room (“Family Institution”), Whiplash (“Mentor Institution”), Her (“Separation Passage”), and Birdman (which, as I demonstrated in a previous post, is a “Fool out of Water” story).  Not particularly encouraging.

In their most recent breakdown, they’ve attempted to apply Blake’s beat sheet to the pilot episode of Game of Thrones.  With my Raiders breakdown in mind, have a quick look at their effort here (feel free to skim—you only need to get the gist in order to follow my assessment of it).

Using "Save the Cat!" to analyze "Game of Thrones" proves tricky
There’s a VERY particular reason “Game of Thrones” failed to reach a satisfying conclusion…

Notice how clean and to-the-point the Raiders analysis is?  Now compare that with the Game of Thrones breakdown, which is mired in needlessly copious detail and author commentary, as the analyst attempts to illustrate that “Winter Is Coming,” like any other good story, conforms to the Save the Cat! precepts—and yet the more closely the episode is studied, the less it seems to actually adhere to them!

So, instead of saying, “Gee, this isn’t going like I originally thought at allGame of Thrones appears to operate on an altogether different narrative wavelength,” the analysis is instead loaded with conditionals:  “this B Story doesn’t fully interweave with the journey of the main protagonist”; “the main story of the pilot episode is structurally the equivalent of just Act One from Blake’s beat sheets”; “many of the storylines weaved over the series often will not simply resolve where their Act 3 would normally otherwise end, but rather they then evolve into a new story.”

Wouldn’t any of that seem to suggest the conclusions of this experiment in narrative reverse-engineering aren’t supporting the thesis?  Not according to this examination, which posits instead that “Blake’s other beats are simply yet to come.”

Here’s the logical (read:  actual) takeaway:  The reason the analyst had such a hard time making Game of Thrones fit comfortably within the Save the Cat! paradigm is because it doesn’t.

Dig the metaphor?
Dig the metaphor?

Blake’s beat sheet—which is just Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey,” or monomyth, by another name—and his innovative (if entirely misunderstood) genre categories were only designed to apply to narratives in the Aristotelian mode; they didn’t account for the new storytelling form that’s only emerged relatively recently:  postnarrativity.  Stories in this vein include Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Lost, Heroes, Once Upon a Time, The X-Files, The Sopranos, Orphan Black, The Last Man on Earth, Arrested Development, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, to name but a handful.

The stages of Joseph Campbell's cyclical "monomyth," the basis for the "Save the Cat!" beat sheet
The stages of Joseph Campbell’s cyclical “monomyth,” the basis for the “Save the Cat!” beat sheet

Unlike the closed-ended monomyth—with its beginning, middle, end, and, most importantly, remunerable moral (the “Return with the Elixir”)—open-ended “postnarrative” stories are “not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible.  There is plot—there are many plots—but there is no overarching story, no end.  There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock:  When Everything Happens Now [New York:  Penguin Group, 2013], 34).

(Postnarrativity, for those who haven’t read my previous posts on the subject, is an artistic expression of our anxieties about the Digital Age, in which our collective sense of linearity has been disrupted by the “hyperlinked continuity” of modern telecommunications technologies, but you’re better off hearing media theorist Rushkoff explain it.)

Given that storytelling function—to reflect a world in which events unfold simultaneously, not sequentially—how could the narrative beats of Game of Thrones possibly align with, or the genre conventions conform to, a story model that follows a prescriptive Aristotelian arc, the very type Save the Cat! was formulated to service?

In a prescriptive narrative, we take meaning from the ultimate thematic lesson the storyteller has attempted to impart:  Dorothy learns “there’s no place like home.”  In postnarrativity, though, we take meaning, such as it is, from how all the characters and subplots and “Easter eggs” correlate with one another:  What do the numbers mean on Lost?  Who do you suspect are Jon Snow’s biological parents?  Does the monster-of-the-week on X-Files have a supernatural origin or perhaps a scientific explanation?  Spider-Man shows up in Civil War, thereby exposing a heretofore unexplored dimension of that expansive cinematic universe.  It’s the difference between value extraction—the purpose of the Aristotelian arc—and pattern recognition—the raison d’être for postnarrativity.

To be clear, “postnarrative” doesn’t mean serialized24 is serialized, yet dramatizes a closed-looped “hero’s journey” over the course of a full season; CSI, on the other hand, is the very definition of “episodic television,” yet its agenda of pattern recognition over value extraction makes it postnarrative in nature—it is far more concerned with how the perplexing crime-of-the-week was committed than it is with seeing justice served and law and order restored (which is merely a happy byproduct of all the forensic puzzling).

The difference between the two divergent forms becomes obvious once you know to look for it.  How could all the plotlines and motifs of shows such as Game of Thrones and Lost, with their rabbit-hole mythologies, really tie themselves up in a bow that pays off every character, every subplot, every turn of action throughout the run of the series the way closed-ended analogs like Lord of the Rings and Gilligan’s Island do?  I mean, does anyone really watch The Walking Dead to see how the zombie plague is eventually overcome, or is that irrelevant—and that the point is merely to take pleasure in the very particular postapocalyptic challenges that arise from week to week, for however long they may last?

The shows are less about what will happen next, or how the story will end, than about figuring out what is actually going on right now—and enjoying the world of the fiction, itself.

ibid., 32

These stories simply aren’t meant to conform to the familiar, linear three-act structure of Joseph Campbell, but rather to exist in a perpetual stage of Fun and Games (one of the aforementioned Save the Cat! story beats); there’s no All Is Lost or Dark Night of the Soul or Break into Three, because those beats are intended to lead a story down the road to conclusion and catharsis, and postnarrativity is concerned with neither.

Put another way:  What kind of game is the game of thrones, exactly?  One like an online, multiplayer RPG—in which the objective isn’t to prevail, only to keep the game going in sustained perpetuity.  That’s postnarrativity.

On his blog The Incompetent Writer, Daniel Wallace recently illustrated the very never-ending nature of postnarrativity in a clever post entitled “A Quick One-Sentence Question about Games of Thrones” that runs over five hundred words before abruptly terminating midsentence with a dash, just like the infamous postnarrative “conclusion” to The Sopranos.  Postnarrativity is simply a different way of structuring fiction, making it an alternative—but equally legitimate—way of viewing the world as the time-tested monomythic arc.

(Editor’s note:  The Incompetent Writer is now a defunct blog, and that post is no longer available to view online.)

As such, attempting to apply the principles of conventional storytelling (à la Aristotle, Joseph Campbell, Christopher Vogler, Blake Snyder) to postnarrativity can be problematic, as the Save the Cat! analysis of Game of Thrones plainly demonstrates.  Unlike the classical “hero’s journey” model, postnarrativity hasn’t yet been codified, so its structural components and conventional criteria can’t be assessed via the tried-and-true metrics of an altogether different narrative schema.

As the STC! analyst himself acknowledges, that’s not to imply there isn’t dramatic structure to Game of Thrones—it just doesn’t adhere to the closed-ended “beat sheet” as Blake devised it, nor to his particular genre classifications.  (I would certainly not designate the plot of “Winter Is Coming” as Dude with a Problem; if anything, it bears closer resemblance to Institutionalized, but again, it would be a mistake to impose one of Blake’s narrative categories—and its corresponding conventions—on a story in the postnarrative mode.)

Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and "Present Shock"
Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff and “Present Shock”

Now, all that said, the purpose of this post is not to school the Cats on the nuances of story structure, but rather to make an impassioned plea for the integrity of the very program they themselves advocate.  I subscribe to these principles, and when I see them misrepresented and misapplied, it diminishes their value—undermines their credibility—as tools of the craft, like a blade dulled from improper use and care.

My great mentor David Freeman once defined writing as the artful application of exact technique to produce something that transcends logic to become beauty (emphasis mine).  Mastering craft is an arduous, years-long, often solitary apprenticeship, made all the more difficult, really, by the endless blogs and self-appointed gurus out there hawking half-baked methodologies and dispensing haphazard, noncodified “tips.”  I can’t imagine navigating that sea of “information” as an aspiring writer looking to learn the craft; I suspect it would’ve filled my receptive mind with a lot of wrongheaded ideas, or, conversely, turned my head around so badly that I wound up dismissing the notion of a methodical, disciplined approach to fiction writing as pure bullshit…

… which many, alas, do.  I know many a working screenwriter who consider any screenwriting instructional to be snake oil, and that the secret, in their estimation, to learning the craft is, quite simply, to read a thousand screenplays.  (Personally, I don’t see how that’s any more effective than watching a thousand movies; it doesn’t make one any more cognizant of the “invisible” techniques at work—those that operate beneath the audience’s conscious awareness, to borrow another observation from Dave Freeman.)

And that’s to say nothing of the scores of Save the Cat! critics who cite its influence on Hollywood’s by-the-numbers approach to moviemaking (and it has been influential, I can testify firsthand, but any adverse impacts are primarily owed to the perversion of its principles by studio executives into a cookie-cutter template for the commercialized mass-production of an ostensibly creative product).  Save the Cat! is already viewed by many as a nostrum, and not, unfortunately, as a remarkable set of tools that can unlock the hidden mechanics of narrative and open up worlds of opportunity for those with the patience to master them and skill to use them artfully.

Save the Cat! is anything but a magic formula, despite being extolled and castigated in equal measure for such a fallacy.  The fact remains, writers that don’t want to take the time and trouble to master their craft prefer to think of storytelling as an entirely intuitive process—an act of sorcery conjured by those with the God-given yet incommunicable gift of talent.  On the other end of the spectrum, scribes that haven’t yet developed confidence in their skills cling to absolutes—“rules” they can follow so they know they’re writing “correctly.”  (Hollywood development execs—the same ones mentioned in the paragraph above—are notorious for their dogmatic devotion to “rules.”)

The truth resides halfway between such opposing misconceptions:  Undisciplined talent will only take a writer so far, and there aren’t any “rules” to writing—just tools, techniques, and principles that can be learned, can be practiced, can be mastered.  A writer with talent and with discipline?  That’s the stuff of creative prosperity and professional longevity.

So, the salient question, it seems, is not whether Save the Cat! is making Hollywood more formulaic, but whether the tools themselves are being applied skillfully and taught responsibly.  Shortly after publishing his third STC! book, Blake Snyder passed away, suddenly and prematurely, and those who inherited his enterprise—which makes its bones selling workshops and consultations—don’t appear, by any evidence, to have his masterful command of the principles he developed; they certainly don’t have his industry credentials.

These days, anyone can anoint themselves an expert on anything—all it takes is an inflated ego and a social-media platform to do so—and the craft of writing/storytelling in particular, inherently a somewhat esoteric field of study, has been subjected to more than its share of false prophets.  To borrow a lyric from Rush’s Neil Peart:  “Fools and thieves are well disguised / In the temple and marketplace.”

I believe in the methodologies of Blake Snyder—I think his stuff on genre in particular is right on the money and truly one of a kind, and should be given serious consideration—I’m just sorry he’s no longer around to safeguard it from those who misapprehend and misapply it so routinely and authoritatively (in his name, no less).  The deconstruction of Game of Thrones offers an invaluable lesson to students of the discipline, if not the one Save the Cat! intended:  Learning this stuff’s the easy part; it’s the mastering of it that’s so time-consuming and tricky.

There are three pillars to basic storytelling:  structure, genre, and characterization.  Anyone looking to learn those rudimentals can spare themselves a lot of wrong turns and dead ends by studying Vogler for mythic structure, Snyder for genre, and Freeman for characterization.  (And those interested in further reading on postnarrativity are referred to the first chapter of Rushkoff’s Present Shock.)  Choose your teachers well—as well as you can given all the shouting voices—and, most of all, keep practicing.  Respect the conceptual tools of the trade, but understand that their use—and eventual mastery—isn’t an end unto itself; nobody gets points for how efficiently they wield a hammer, only how effectively they built the house.

With that in mind, use the mythic form to help shape your narratives, if appropriate, but don’t waste time bending and twisting and squeezing a story (either preexisting or gestating) to fit that prescribed mold beat-for-beat for the express purpose of justifying your faith in the methodology; you do yourself, your work, and the precepts themselves a disservice when you misuse them.  Put the same meticulous care into utilizing the Save the Cat! techniques as Blake invested in developing them; what a fitting way to honor his tremendous contributions to the writer’s toolbox that would be.


Postscript (November 18, 2022):  In the six years since this post was first published, the so-called “Master Cats” have only further eroded the credibility of the Save the Cat! storytelling program by consistently misidentifying the genre of one film after another.  A sampling of movies they’ve misclassified:

Furthermore, the books that have been published under the STC! banner since then—Save the Cat! Writes a Novel, Save the Cat! Goes to the Indies, and Save the Cat! Writes for TV—are full of equally wrongheaded and/or misguided advice.  These supplemental manuals are to be avoided at all costs.

There is much to learn about the craft of storytelling from Save the Cat!, but it is crucial to study only the three books (and the blog posts) written by Blake Snyder himself.  Snyder is surely spinning in his grave over how badly his screenwriting program and dramatic principles have been corrupted by those who make their living misusing and misteaching the tools he innovated.

18 Comments

  1. D. Wallace Peach

    Your posts are always interesting, Sean. I don’t mind loose ends. I loved Lost and don’t miss a Walking Dead or Game of Thrones episode, though I do hope they wrap up most of the plot lines before they conclude. Reading audiences still seem to appreciate it when the threads are tied up at the end of a book. It they aren’t, there’s almost an expectation that a sequel will follow to take care of them. I have a feeling that audiences are more tolerant of narrative oddities in movies than in books, and more tolerant of unexplained phenomena in sci-fi/fantasy genres where elements of world building are just taken for granted. Why are there giants in the north of Game of Thrones? Who cares – no explanation required. 😀 Much to think about and so wonderful that storytelling continues to evolve.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Well, thanks for reading this one, Diana! You wouldn’t know it, but this was intended to be a simple 800-word rebuttal to the Save the Cat! piece (which, it’s worth noting, they doubled down on this morning), but, as usually happens when I start refining my thoughts on a given topic, I find I have a lot more to say than I initially estimated! Thanks for reading it through; I appreciate the time you took to do so.

      Clearly the immense popularity of postnarrative fiction — be it Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead or the multimedia Marvel juggernaut — indicates it is resonating with us culturally; audiences respond to the fact that postnarrativity reflects the nonlinear, hyperlinked reality of our new millennium in a way the old paradigm doesn’t. The trouble these series run into eventually, however, is that we still carry with us, after over 2,000 years of repeated exposure to the Aristotelian arc, an expectation of closure — and finality of any kind is the antithesis of postnarrativity, which is all about sustained perpetuity, not zero-sum resolutions. (In that sense, it is a very healthy worldview!)

      So, for instance, in this just-published critique from Vox of “No One,” the most recent episode of Game of Thrones (no spoilers to follow), culture editor Todd VanDerWerff seems frustrated by the fact that the showrunners are rushing the various players to hasty resolutions of their particular plotlines in order to move them along toward some inevitable climactic confrontation (“the show is in full-on, ‘Let’s just close off as many storylines as we can’ mode”), yet he holds out hope that said grand finale will be worth the wait (“I remain convinced that [the] end game will prove fairly satisfying, but the maneuvering required to get everybody into position for it has been going on for several books now with no end in sight”).

      No end in sight? That’s the very definition — the point, even — of postnarrative fiction. And given that Benioff and Weiss are starting to “close out storylines” on the TV series, doesn’t it stand to reason the audience is rejecting it? (My wife, who’s read all the books, was similarly critical of “No One.”) Clearly, Benioff and Weiss are ready to move on to other projects — one only has so many productive creative years, after all — and yet the series’ postnarrative engine demands the story keep going (and going, and going, and going…). I wouldn’t be altogether surprised if Benioff and Weiss soon find themselves facing a Damon Lindelof–style backlash as they try to bring closure to a narrative that was never innately designed to accommodate such an outmoded convention.

      But I agree with you: to explain the White Walkers — or the cryptic sequence of numbers on Lost, or the origin of the zombie virus in The Walking Dead, or any of the world-building idiosyncrasies of these shows, really — would be to take the joy out of the viewing experience. We don’t look to these stories for moral guidance (nobody expects a tidy or heartwarming “lesson”); we rely on them instead to give us something to puzzle out — to serve as an exercise in pattern recognition for a culture desperate to find some kind of meaningful signal in the bombardment of constant telecommunications noise; that’s why there are so many “aftershows” now dedicated to dissecting every little Easter egg on GoT, Walking Dead, Orphan Black, etc. When we finally come to understand that the endgame, if there even is one, of these shows is irrelevant, and that they fulfill an altogether different emotional and intellectual need, we’ll learn to adjust our expectations accordingly and stop waiting for one. In a postnarrative world, after all, there is no end to anything in sight — not text messages or status updates, not political gridlock or wars of attrition — and these stories, in their particular way, are here to help us deal with that.

      Thanks, as always, Diana, for contributing.

  2. Leonide Martin

    Thoughtful post with incisive analysis, thanks for putting it together so well. As a writer, I agree with your comments about choosing your teachers well, and combining creative imagination with solid principles and techniques. I was glad to learn about postnarrativity; now I can understand that feeling of incompleteness and intertwined complexities that such works as Game of Thrones produce.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thanks so much for the nice words, Leonide!

      Like the STC! analyst who took on Game of Thrones, I struggled myself at one point to identify the narrative patterns and genre conventions in works like GoT, Orphan Black, Sleepy Hollow, The Walking Dead, etc. — they just didn’t align with the mythic structural criteria as I understood them. So I spent quite a bit of time researching the matter, and that led me to Rushkoff and his enlightening evaluation of “postnarrative” storytelling. Even if you’re not inclined to read Present Shock, you can get the gist of his thesis from this worthwhile magazine interview from April 2015. He talks about how the traditional story arc stopped reflecting the new digital world we were living in — one in which our attentions are pulled in multiple directions at once, like 9-1-1 operators, by all the pinging and buzzing and beeping of our telecommunications technologies. So, in that sense, the “feeling of incompleteness and intertwined complexities” of shows like Game of Thrones are very much the point of the narrative experience — they are meant to mirror our perception of reality here in the 21st century; the linear “hero’s journey” arc, alas, just doesn’t cut it anymore. But… Rushkoff does discuss in the article how there’s still a need for “prescriptive” narratives, “[i]t’s just that we have to almost consciously reintegrate those stories and understand that they’re just one way of seeing the world.” I think it behooves all writers, regardless of one’s structural/conventional preferences, to be familiar, to be consciously aware, of this newfound storytelling pattern, because — in true postnarrative fashion — it isn’t going anywhere. Please let me know if Rushkoff’s philosophy (’cause I certainly don’t take credit for any of this) changes the way you watch some of those shows…

      Thanks for joining the conversation, Leonide!

  3. Gabriel Barros

    But Sean, could not a skilled writer use both at the same time?

    I mean, the SERIES may be postnarrative but the episode plot follow the Aristotelian model? (so instead of a character arc or journey we would have a episode-contained plot arc?

    • Sean P Carlin

      Hi, Gabriel! Thanks so much for reading the piece and taking the time to leave a comment. So glad you joined the conversation!

      Let me start be saying this: There’s no limit to the narrative permutations skilled writers are capable of innovating. The art and craft of storytelling continue to evolve because masterful artists are always pushing the limits of what’s accepted and what’s possible to express themselves more fully and creatively.

      For instance, look at the way Dan Fogelman has completely reinvented the stalwart television staple we call the “family drama” with This Is Us: He’s taken a genre we’re all intimately familiar with — so familiar, in fact, we look to it for comfort (because there’s solace in familiarity) — and made it exciting and unpredictable again through an unconventional (that is to say, nonlinear) presentational approach. I’m sure this series was a tough sell on paper, because it’s so different from how the typical family drama (like Gilmore Girls and Parenthood) is structured, and yet audiences are responding to it precisely because it is atypical — because all the tired conventions of the genre have been put in a blender and made new again.

      So, as my great mentor Dave Freeman is so fond of saying, there are no rules — only tools. Good storytelling instructionals, like Save the Cat!, offer codified principles that allow talented writers to maximize their creative potential; they supply techniques and methods that can help turn talent (which is congenital) into skill (which is cultivated).

      But the principles of Save the Cat! (among other screenwriting programs) are not a set of absolutes; they’re not like the assembly instructions to a bookcase from IKEA. And (part of) the point of this article was to demonstrate that the successors of the late Blake Snyder don’t really understand the tools they make their living selling; they treat them as a one-size-fits-all formula — a universal Rosetta Stone of storytelling — and consequently they try to make everything fit within their tragically limited apprehension of Blake’s principles, as they plainly did with the Game of Thrones pilot. Doing so makes them look like fools, and it undermines the credibility of the program itself, which is valuable despite how badly they’ve bastardized it. (Case in point: Just last week they categorized Frankenstein and An American Werewolf in London as “Pure Monster” movies, when they are in fact “Fantasy Superhero.”)

      But I digress. Let me now address your direct question above. When we talk about the Aristotelian arc versus the new postnarrative mode, it’s important to remember that we are talking about function as much as form.

      But what do I mean by that?

      Prescriptive Aristotelian stories — that is, ones the follow the closed-looped “hero’s journey” model — reach a conclusive resolution, through which they impart a value or lesson or takeaway moral: The Wizard of Oz teaches us there’s no place like home; Groundhog Day shows us the futility of cynicism; The Road Warrior and Children of Men remind us we can still have purpose even when all hope is lost; movies like Dead Poets Society and Wolf demonstrate value of living authentically. These kinds of stories, therefore, are about value extraction: We the audience get a reward at the end — new insight or wisdom — for having endured the adventure with the protagonist in the final stage of the hero’s journey known as the Return with the Elixir.

      Postnarrativity, however, does away with the Return with the Elixir stage, regardless of whether the story is open- or closed-ended. Open-ended series like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead have no Return with the Elixir beat by virtue of the fact that they have no conclusion — they keep going and going and going — but what about postnarrative series like Seinfeld and CSI and any of the standalone monster-of-the-week entries in The X-Files? Like you said above: They’re closed-looped, so don’t they logically follow the Aristotelian story arc?

      The answer is no. Even though every episode of Seinfeld and CSI reaches a climax — the central story problem raised in a given episode is concluded by the end — there’s still no Return with the Elixir (which is to say there’s no “moral of the story”). There’s no lesson learned at the end of Seinfeld; if the characters spend an entire episode waiting for a table at a restaurant, or searching for their car in a parking lot, the story ends with either an achieved or failed resolution, but no wisdom is extracted from the experience.

      Likewise, on Law & Order (prescriptive narrative), when a crime is committed, a value is now at stake (the value being justice), but on CSI (postnarrative), a crime exists solely for the purpose of puzzling out how it was done.

      And on The X-Files, Mulder and Scully will spend an entire episode investigating the case-of-the-week, debating between themselves whether the explanation for the strange phenomenon is scientific or supernatural, and yet how does it all invariably end? No conclusive resolution is ever reached: In the final scene, Mulder and Scully simply report to Skinner that they investigated the matter and were unable to definitively determine a cause for it. Compare that with any standalone episode of Buffy, in which the paranormal antagonist/event exists as a metaphor to give us insight into human nature; no such philosophical or existential insights are ever offered by The X-Files, even when an individual, self-contained episodic arc concludes. Because even when The X-Files provides conclusions, it never offers resolutions.

      So whether you have postnarrative series that provide conclusions (like Seinfeld, CSI, and on occasion The X-Files) or don’t (like The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead), none of them ever offer resolutions — none of them let you leave the story with a “boon” or elixir for having undertaken the adventure. If the classical Aristotelian narrative is about value extraction, then postnarrativity is merely about pattern recognition — i.e., understanding how all the disparate components in the world of the fiction correlate and connect.

      And that’s what I mean when I say that postnarrativity differs from the monomyth in both form and function: Postnarrative fiction is not only shaped differently than the hero’s journey arc, it serves an entirely different purpose. The Lord of the Rings is about value extraction; Game of Thrones is about pattern recognition. Law & Order is about value extraction; CSI is about pattern recognition. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is about value extraction; The X-Files is about pattern recognition. Does that make sense?

      So for the so-called Master Cats over at Save the Cat! to try to squeeze “Winter Is Coming” into the beat sheet (which is just Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” by another name), all they’re demonstrating is the limits of their understanding of narratology. They’re trying to sell STC! as a one-size-fits-all formula, because that’s much more appealing to an aspiring screenwriter than the truth: that mastering the discipline of storytelling is a years-long apprenticeship with no shortcuts or magic wands. What Save the Cat! (as Snyder envisioned it) does offer is this: a remarkable, versatile set of tools that can help a writer reach his full artistic potential. But it’s just a toolbox; it isn’t the be-all and end-all, and it isn’t a magic formula. A writer’s understanding of the capacity for creativity through the narrative arts is limited only by the extent of his willingness to challenge his assumptions, and to challenge conventional wisdom. So I thank you for being one of those willing to do so, Gabriel! Please stop by the blog again…

      Sean

      • Johannigan

        Excellent article though I’m not a Save the Cat Writing fan. I don’t like sentence diagramming or freudian analysis of plots. Although I’m a pantser, mostly, I’ve used a modified version of Alexandra Sokoloff’s index card sys for years. I even banged together 4 tiered wood bleachers with slits for cards to hold summaries for chap’s, themes, characters.Only problem is I have 4 novels in progress (& just finished one) so desktop looks like a wood pile! As I told a fellow blogger, sometimes a great story’s not a journey; it’s a scat, a riff on life, a good smoke (figuratively), a good soak in the vital fluid/DNA we all share. Kind Regards, Jo

        • Sean P Carlin

          Welcome, Jo, to the blog, and thank you for reading and commenting on this particular post. I’m delighted you’ve joined the ongoing conversation here!

          Under my Start Here tab, you’ll find a subsection titled Narrative Craft in which I highlight key blog posts that explore the pros and cons of other writing tools, programs, and methodologies — such as “The Road Back,” which studies Christopher Vogler’s The Writer’s Journey, and “Some Assembly Required,” whereby I walk through my creative process of “breaking the back” of my story on a Save the Cat! “beat sheet” and then plotting it on a (virtual) corkboard with a series of 40 index cards before I “go to pages,” as they say.

          I don’t advocate for any one writing program or process over another; I simply share the tools that have helped me facilitate my own creativity and productivity. My background is in screenwriting, a discipline that doesn’t encourage “pantsing,” given all the voices besides the writer’s that have a say in a given project at every stage of its development (managers, agents, studio execs, producers, directors, etc.).

          Ultimately, I believe professional storytelling is an applied discipline — something that can be taught and learned — but there is undeniably an alchemical component to creativity that can absolutely be suffocated under the weight of too much consciously practiced technique, too much dogmatic devotion to codified craft. It’s a balancing act, for sure. Think of talent as the unquantifiable component of creativity — the particular artistic impulse one is born with. Talent is the thermonuclear fire that burns within us and compels us to create, right?

          If that’s the case, then skill is the toolbox we call upon to create to the fullest extent of our abilities, time and again, often on deadline. We develop skill by studying and practicing our craft. And over time, as our skill set becomes “instinctive” and our confidence in our craft rises, our innate talent asserts its dominance over our creative process. When we write with complete trust in our instincts and abilities, we’ve become masters of our craft. (Or, to borrow the phrasing of the late musician Neil Peart, we are at least “master students” at that point!)

          It took me many, many years of trial-and-error to become a “master student” — i.e., to develop my toolbox sufficiently and reach the point where my skills were second nature, available on-demand. In some respects, when I wrote this post over six years ago, I was still very much on that creative journey of synthesizing talent and skill. But with several manuscripts under my belt now, I’m less curious about demystifying craft than I once was. That’s why most of my posts these days are concerned with matters of moral creativity, which is to say how the stories we tell shape the world in which we live. I hope you’ll come back this way again, Jo, and share your own insights and stories. In the meantime, I wish you a happy holiday season and the best of health and creativity in 2023!

          Sean

  4. Partha

    Hi Sean,

    At first, a heartfelt thank you for writing this post. I just stumbled upon it, while googling for answers, after being paranoid and clueless with a drama that I am developing. I have been a fan of Joseph Campbell and Blake Snyder’s toolsets for years now, and while I have had this hunch of these self-styled master-cats trying to commoditize Blake’s invaluable tools, I had been in a denial mode for so long, trying to scratch my brains as they went about reverse engineering any story into the beat sheet.

    When I started developing this drama project (which by the way, is supposed to be a an open ended series), I had a difficult time trying to put in practice Blake’s toolsets to an open ended stuff which I now realize is so aptly called ‘Postnarrative’. The hunch of treading down a wrong path made me read through a few ‘How to wrote for TV’ kind of books, most notable being ‘Writing the Plot’ by William Rabkin (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35149334-writing-the-pilot). It gave me the much needed clarity of the fundamental differences between the two forms. While going through this exercise, I could still fall back on many of the techniques defined by Blake, but the use of either of the techniques at the right point seems to be a matter of skill and art itself!

    Am still developing the overall structure for this drama, but this post of yours has turned out to be an enlightening milestone in this journey. Thank you!

    • Sean P Carlin

      Partha,

      I’m absolutely delighted you’ve found the post so useful, so informative. It was always intended as an impassioned plea to the so-called “Master Cats” to stop undermining the credibility of these indispensable storytelling tools by habitually misapplying them. (Fat chance that’s gonna happen!)

      It’s just painfully apparent, if you read their weekly “beat sheets” and genre classifications, that they haven’t the first clue how to use any of those tools. (I submit as evidence of that claim the beat sheet they reverse-engineered from Raiders of the Lost Ark versus mine above. ‘Nuff said.) Blake died, suddenly and unexpectedly, and his unqualified acolytes took the reins of the empire he’d left behind. And now they make their living teaching these principles, but how can you teach what you yourself plainly don’t understand? (And forget postnarrativity — that’s a concept completely beyond their finite grasp.)

      That’s why, for those who wish to learn Save the Cat! (and I thoroughly recommend it), you must only study the three books Snyder himself wrote. Don’t put stock in any of the blog posts on the website that weren’t written by Blake, and don’t waste time on any of the books written by others under the Save the Cat! banner. Take my word for it: None of those guys have the first clue what they’re talking about. I don’t say that to be mean-spirited or vindictive, merely to safeguard the integrity of the program itself. Since Blake’s no longer around to do it, somebody has to.

      Now, with respect to your own project, Blake’s structural principles, as you’re beginning to see, can really only be made to serve stories in the Aristotelian mode — the closed-ended monomyth, a.k.a. Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” — and should not be applied to postnarrative fiction. (Save the Cat! is an extremely versatile storytelling tool, but it doesn’t apply to every story, no matter what the “Master Cats” might insist.) Most TV drama these days — though certainly not all — takes a postnarrative approach, growing more open as it goes along, instead of narrowing to a point of closure and catharsis.

      Unlike the monomyth, postnarrativity — still a nascent form of storytelling — hasn’t yet been formally codified, but there’s no question that a writer needs to at least be consciously aware of whether he’s writing something in the Aristotelian or postnarrative vein. That’s the trap George R. R. Martin has fallen into: He keeps promising a “grand finale” to A Song of Ice and Fire, but doesn’t seem to fundamentally understand that a satisfying resolution to that sprawling series is A) probably impossible to achieve and B) utterly beside the point anyway. (Hence the reason he’s yet to deliver on a concluding book.) Postnarrative fiction serves a different purpose than the prescriptive Aristotelian arc, something I discussed in this article, but that’s more fully explored in Douglas Rushkoff’s mind-blowing book Present Shock.

      I haven’t read Rabkin’s book, but I’m curious to check it out. Hopefully he has some good suggestions how to approach writing an open-ended pilot, from conception to structuring to finished script. I don’t write for TV — my current WIP is a self-contained, standalone novel — so I’m able to use the tools and techniques of Campbell/Vogler/Snyder to aid my process. I find them invaluable, actually.

      But, yes: Mastering the principles of Save the Cat! is a years-long apprenticeship of trial and error — of practice, practice, and more practice! Keep using and applying them, and they will become second nature eventually. Don’t do what the creative execs in Hollywood are notorious for: flipping through the manual once and thinking they know all the secrets to storytelling. And don’t look to the “Master Cats” for guidance, either; everything you need to know about Save the Cat! you can still learn from Blake himself — in the three wonderful books he left behind.

      And do take the time to read Rushkoff (the first chapter of Present Shock is devoted exclusively to the collapse of narrative); anyone writing in the postnarrative style should be familiar with it. I mean, you talk about this post being enlightening — and I appreciate that, my new friend! — but it’s Rushkoff’s work that all of this is based upon. When I read Present Shock, it completely altered my understanding of both the narrative arts and the new Digital Age in which we live. If you’ve found my little post edifying, Rushkoff is going to blow your mind!

      Let me know how you enjoy it, pal. And please keep me apprised on the progress of your project. Your comments/questions are welcome here on the blog anytime

      Sean

      • Partha

        Thanks Sean!

        Will report back soon once I have gone through ‘Present Shock’ and solidify my apparent hunch for a code for post-narrative.

        • Sean P Carlin

          Partha, I would truly love to hear what you come up with! Part of the reason I wrote this article, as well as “Journey’s End,” was as a call to action for intrepid narratologists out there to see if they could decode postnarrativity just as scholars like Aristotle and Campbell and Vogler and Snyder did for the hero’s journey. I have some thoughts of my own on the matter, though I haven’t yet attempted a formal codification (I’m too busy working on my first full-length novel), but there’s no question that Present Shock is the launch pad for studying this new story form — the Poetics of postnarrativity, if you like. Definitely read it. (I think Snyder himself would’ve been taken with Rushkoff’s observations, and would have no doubt been inspired to embrace the unique challenge of codifying postnarrative fiction. It’s a pity we’ll never get his scholarly insights on the matter.)

          And please stay in touch. Come back to join me for future discussions on storytelling craft, and reach out to me via e-mail, if you care to, to discuss/debate postnarrativity. I’m delighted you’re as excited by Rushkoff’s revelations as I have been.

          Sean

      • Johannigan

        Interesting thoughts on Martin; you may be correct. I like to think he’s not finished because, like others of us, he’s in love with many things. Writing is one of them. There’s only so many hours to spend in the day and if you love many darling things, each one gets just so much attention??? I do agree with what you said RE treating all the techniques, from Aristotle on down, as potentially useful tools. The most useful tool, IMO, is one’s imagination and capacity to feel dread, disgust, awe, and joy at the same time.

        • Sean P Carlin

          Martin’s problem, Jo, is that he ultimately does not fundamentally understand the kind of fiction he is writing. (Neither did Benioff and Weiss, for that matter, nor did Damon Lindelof when he created Lost.) He thinks he’s producing a latter-day Lord of the Rings, one of his formative influences, but Tolkien’s trilogy was a closed-ended narrative driven toward a decisive resolution to an overarching dramatic question: Will the One Ring be destroyed? (David Chase, on the other hand, fully understood that The Sopranos was not The Godfather; Chase’s antiheroes in fact longed “to be characters in The Godfather movies, who lived by a strict code of ethics and whose careers had more predictable, traditional arcs” [Rushkoff, Present Shock, 33].)

          A Song of Ice and Fire, by contrast, is more akin to a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, where the goal isn’t to reach resolution, but rather to keep the game going for as long as possible. It’s what’s known as “storyless” or “postnarrative” fiction, a topic I covered initially in “Journey’s End” and more recently in “The End.” I realize that disaffected Game of Thrones fans are counting on Martin to provide the satisfying conclusion that the TV series failed to deliver on, but for reasons I explored in “Game Over,” his saga — in any medium — simply refuses to progress down the narrow, linear path to resolution, opting instead to expand outwards and even backwards! I stand by my assertion: A work of fiction that was never designed to conclude cannot reach a conclusion, satisfying or otherwise.

          Where Martin, Benioff and Weiss, and Lindelof all went wrong was by promising “grand finales” to series that were, from the outset, designed to become more open, rather than closed, as they went along. That’s where those storytellers erred: by not properly conditioning audience expectations. David Chase never promised a big ending, and he didn’t deliver on one, terminating Tony’s “story,” such as it was, on an inconclusive cut to black. Michael Corleone’s story reached a decisive end, but Tony Soprano’s never will. That’s postnarrative fiction.

          Which is why at least a rudimental grasp of the Aristotelian story arc — as well as Joseph Campbell’s “hero’s journey” and other likeminded schema — behooves the writer, because storytelling is all about deliberate manipulation: setting expectations and then artfully fulfilling or subverting them. But when the storyteller promises a Grand Finale and then can’t deliver one — and I assure you Martin cannot — then don’t be surprised when audiences revolt. Just ask Damon Lindelof about that!

          Thanks, Jo, for the thoughtful comment. Come back again!

  5. mydangblog

    This is fascinating stuff. You’ve spoken a lot about visual post-narrative, but I wonder where we can trace the original literary subversion of Campbell/archetypes to. I would hazard at guess at Joyce and Finnegan’s Wake, or at least the early 20th century stream-of-consciousness writers. I always look to Wilde for the absolute encapsulation of traditional narrative with his famous line: “The good end happily, the bad unhappily. That is the meaning of fiction.” He was being satirical, but he was accurate for his time period. This was excellent and thought-provoking reading!

    • Sean P Carlin

      Thank you, mydangblog! Here’s a little background: I am a passionate exponent of the storytelling principles of Blake Snyder, particularly his ten genre classifications. When I was first studying Save the Cat!, I would analyze every story I consumed according to Snyder’s codifications, identifying its genre. Sure enough, every story adhered to his “beat sheet” (which is just Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey by another set of names), and fit comfortably into one of his versatile story models.

      And then the universality of Snyder’s teachings came to a sudden screeching halt.

      In 2013, I was watching a new series called Orphan Black — filmed in your hometown of Toronto — and I found myself having the damnedest time making it fit into one of his genres. Was it Dude with a Problem? Not really. Superhero? Ehh. Nothing quite fit.

      As fate would have it, at that very same time, I started reading a book by media theorist Douglas Rushkoff called Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (after seeing him interviewed on The Colbert Report). The very first chapter, Narrative Collapse, illustrates “the loss of linear stories and their replacement with both crass reality programming and highly intelligent post-narrative shows like The Simpsons. With no goals to justify journeys, we get the impatient impulsiveness of the Tea Party, as well as the unbearably patient presentism of the Occupy movement. The new path to sense-making is more like an open game than a story.”

      In a nutshell, the linear, closed-ended understanding of reality that has been the worldview of Western civilization for the past 2,000 years has given way to a “hyperlinked” Weltanschauung (since we were just discussing the subject of multisyllabic words on your blog!), something reflected in our fictions like Lost, Game of Thrones, and The Walking Dead, which “are less about what will happen next, or how the story will end, than about figuring out what is actually going on right now — and enjoying the world of the fiction, itself” (Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, [New York: Penguin Group, 2013], 32).

      So, for example, when you watch Westworld, you’re not being told a storyyou’re being asked to put together a puzzle. Postnarrativity isn’t about value extraction (a “moral of the story”) so much as pattern recognition — figuring out how all the dots connect, because nothing has been presented in a conventionally linear fashion. Reality is fractured now — open-ended instead of conclusive — and our stories reflect that.

      So while Oscar Wilde’s conception of fiction — “Everything is going to be fine in the end. If it’s not fine it’s not the end” — might even apply to the kind of postmodernist/poststructuralist fiction you cite, it isn’t relevant to postnarrativity, which “is not about creating satisfying resolutions, but rather about keeping the adventure alive and as many threads going as possible. There is plot — there are many plots — but there is no overarching story, no end. There are so many plots, in fact, that an ending tying everything up seems inconceivable, even beside the point” (ibid., 34).

      This is, admittedly, a complex subject, and I have tried to responsibly represent some of Rushkoff’s notions (he deserves all the credit for anything here you found fascinating), which have been a huge influence on both my own worldview and this blog’s content. I’ll be hosting a guest post later this month on postnarrativity, but in the meantime, I refer you — if interested — to my primer on the topic, “Journey’s End,” and a relevant follow-up piece called “This Counts, That Does Not” about the futility of searching for meaning in postnarrative fiction.

      And, of course, I always recommend reading Present Shock, or at least watching this fifteen-minute encapsulation.

      Thanks, mydangblog, for reading and engaging this admittedly esoteric dissertation!

  6. MG Rondeau

    Thank you! I got what I came for and much more! Though to be honest in my digital busy-ness I didn’t read it all 😂.

    So glad to hear another view of Save the Cat! There seemed to be two camps: the fanatics who live by it and the haters who point out it’s carbon copy nature.

    But you seem to hail its benefits (ones I have come to accept for my own writing) without getting all hung up on it (which I didn’t want to).

    And sometimes a story just doesn’t seem to fit the beat sheet. Like GoT. The more I’ve grown comfortable spotting STC! genres and beats, the less GoT made sense in that style. Your other examples, of course, are the same: the endless Walking Dead, for instance.

    I love this idea you present about the post narrative world of story-telling, and—briefly as I’ve read—its causes and creations. I’d love to delve more into this idea. I can see some of my old college professors in movies getting behind the word “postnarrativity.” I imagine even now that they might be discussing this very post in their classrooms, if they’re smart 😂.

    Anyways, you have widened the door I’d kept but propped open—a door to a richer world that demands only good, fun storytelling, no matter what structure is used. I think I will continue with my blended approach, with all the lessons of good form and lack thereof.

    (Meanwhile, lol at your genre corrections of the STC! blog.)

    Thanks again.

    • Sean P Carlin

      Hey, Matthew! So grateful you took the time to stop by and comment, and I’m happy to hear “Saving the Cat from Itself” offered you value in return for your time and attention. This post actually gets a lot of traffic — perhaps more than any other I’ve published — but it’s been quite a while since someone took the time to comment on it. Thank you — thanks for adding value to this post. (You can find links to what I consider my highest-value posts here.)

      When this post was first published over five years ago, I’d been trying to understand why the tested and trusted storytelling principles of Save the Cat! didn’t seem to apply to so much of the television I was watching, from Game of Thrones to The Walking Dead to Orphan Black. That’s when I came across media theorist Douglas Rushkoff’s book Present Shock, which was the first to identify the collapse of traditional narrativity that occurred around the turn of the millennium. This notion — postnarrativity — was eye-opening for me, and I first wrote about it in a blog post called “Journey’s End.”

      In the years since, I’ve written a great deal more about prescriptive fiction vis-à-vis postnarrative fiction. If you’re interested in further reading on the subject, I recommend “The Road Back: Revisiting The Writer’s Journey (from September 28, 2020) and “The End: Lessons for Storytellers from the Trump Saga” (November 21, 2020). In those fairly recent essays, I talk about how I sense a hunger once again for cathartic storytelling, for aspirational narratives. I think, for the most part, we’ve had our fill of open-ended, nihilistic dystopias — which is fine by me! That hunch seems to have been confirmed by the overwhelming commercial and critical success this year of Ted Lasso, which is the antithesis of all our nonlinear “prestige” dramas and multimedia mega-franchises that go on and on and on to no apparent point.

      A quick word about the Save the Cat! genre classifications. The so-called “Master Cats” have never grasped the point of that tool, perhaps partly because Snyder doesn’t do a particularly great job of explaining it in his books. The “Master Cats” treat those categories like some kind of game: It’s time to play… Name! That! Genre! You know? Just like they try to squeeze every movie or television episode into the beat sheet, whether or not it fits. They only want their faith in the “rules” validated — rules they don’t even understand!

      The idea behind the ten genres — or story models — is that they are all distinct variations on the “hero’s journey,” each governed by its own central dramatic question:

      Golden Fleece: Will the prize be attained?
      Buddy Love: Will the couple be together in the end?
      Whydunit: Will the crime be solved?
      Institutionalized: Will the hero choose the group or himself?
      – Etcetera.

      And once you know which story model your own WIP follows, you can look to cinematic/literary antecedents to study the conventions and how to best observe and/or subvert them. For example, I’m about to start work on an “Angel Bottle” story, so it behooves me to take a close look at Mary Poppins and Weird Science and Aladdin, etc. You’re just looking to the appropriate creative antecedents to see how it’s been done successfully in the past, but, ultimately, an artist is going to want to find his own way of telling stories. These are merely tools, not rules; use them only to the extent you find them helpful, and discard them if they don’t facilitate your creativity.

      But as a storytelling instrument — and I do think it’s an invaluable one — Snyder’s genres have been completely nullified of value, because they’ve been so badly abused by his successors to either misidentify movies (The Craft and Hocus Pocus, for instance, are “Curse Bottle”; An American Werewolf in London and The Nightmare Before Christmas are “Fantasy Superhero”; 1917 is “Epic Fleece”; I could go on) or misapply them to postnarrative works. I would steer clear of that train wreck of a website or any of the STC! books not written by Snyder himself. BJ Markel has mismanaged that entire program into the ground, alas.

      Please come back again, Matthew! So happy to have you here. You’ll find over a hundred posts (and counting) on this blog that explore the way narrativity gives shape and meaning to our lives. We’re story wonks here!

      SPC

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