I have been told never to use passive voice.
Always show, never tell.
Don’t describe the weather, never open with your character waking up, don’t have your character look in the mirror. You must include this character beat on that specific page number. Follow the Hero’s Journey. Open on action. Write short sentences. Always start the chapter with your character’s name. Always end on a cliffhanger, always have your character save a cat.
All of the above pieces of (usually) well-meaning advice deserve their own breakdown in more detail. Suffice to say, before blindly following advice you don’t understand, it is important to know where these declarations come from, and why they are handed out like free samples at Costco.
For now, let’s take a look at “Save the Cat”. (Here, I’m talking about the writing technique, not the book series of the same name which collects several techniques along with a beat-by-beat story structure.)
“Save the cat” is a story technique, originally articulated by screenwriter Blake Snyder, in which you have your protagonist perform some tiny heroic act–such as when the character Ripley saves the cat in the movie Alien (1979)–in order to build audience sympathy for your character. To be clear, this does not mean saving a literal cat, most of the time. This could be any small moment where your hero character takes time out to perform a good deed. As part of the greater Save the Cat story structure formula, this would typically take place early in the story, during the ‘Set-up’ phase.
Save the Cat (the plot device, as well as the structure book) has received criticism over the years, for churning out “formulaic” stories in movies. Some fair, and some not. Sticking for the purposes of this article to the technique itself, it is sometimes wedged in to stories where it doesn’t really fit, because the writer or someone involved treated it as a rule.
There is a reason that Save the Cat is a valuable technique. There is a reason that various story structures work. “Showing” rather than “telling” has a very specific effect on how your reader is involved in the story, which is often–but not always–what you want. There is a reason that short, direct sentences can help drive your story forward.
And knowing how a technique is useful can tell you when to use it.
“Saving the cat” can build an emotional bridge to the audience, giving them a reason to believe in your character’s redeeming qualities. It gives your character a likeability boost. It can help to morally differentiate your character from the villain (who might kill the cat). It shows the initiative your character has, giving a reason to invest in them to drive the story. Because it is small, it does not interrupt the inertia of the core story problem too much.
If you’re having a problem getting readers to connect with your main character, and you need a little likeability boost, have them “save a cat”. If you’re short on time (or pages) and need a shortcut to build quick audience sympathy (which is why it was originally popular in film), throw a cat in there. Another good time to use this is when your main character is someone that people might consider a bad person, such as a hit man, or a con artist, or a drug dealer. Have them “save a cat”.
Again, this does not have to be a literal cat. It could be a child with a skinned knee, or an elderly lady who can’t reach the groceries on the top shelf, or a being from the planet Zsarlax who needs directions and Google Maps is trying to make them turn right at Mars instead of Jupiter.
You can even use this technique in reverse (kill the cat) as a method to make a character less likeable, more villainous. Make the reader root against them.
But you don’t need to do this.
If your character is already likeable, or if your audience has good reason to invest in them regardless, you don’t really need to carve out the page space, and can focus instead on other important story elements. Even a character who is not particularly likeable can get the audience to invest.
Sherlock Holmes, for example, does not save cats.
So the problem is not that “save the cat” and other techniques aren’t useful. The problem is (and not to put too fine a point in it, but here’s the point of the article) these techniques which people sometimes cite as rules of writing are not, in fact, rules. They are tools that have a certain effect in a story. And each of them probably deserves its own post to explore.
The only actual rules of storytelling have to do with the way your brain responds to the story, and why storytelling exists in the first place (which definitely deserves its own post).
In the two decades since, I found myself drifting through several jobs that just paid bills. I have worked as a photographer, a truck driver, tour manager, and online marketing consultant. Finally, the most recent decade, I have settled for working as a software engineer. It pays well, and is something I am actually pretty good at. But I find myself longing to go back to the roots of what I really want to do—what my earlier college career should have told me I need to do—write.
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