Save the Cat!: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need

by Blake Snyder

Along with a good "What is it?" a movie must have a clear sense of what it's about and who it's for. Its tone, potential, the dilemma of its characters, and the type of characters they are, should be easy to understand and compelling.

It must satisfy four basic elements to be effective: 1. Irony. It must be in some way ironic and emotionally involving - a dramatic situation that is like an itch you have to scratch. 2. A compelling mental picture. It must bloom in your mind when you hear it. A whole movie must be implied, often including a time frame. 3. Audience and cost. It must demarcate the tone, the target audience, and the sense of cost, so buyers will know if it can make a profit. 4. A killer title. The one-two punch of a good logline must include a great title, one that "says what it is" and does so in a clever way.

GAME #2: FBI out of water This works for comedy or drama. Name five places that a FBI agent in the movies has never been sent to solve a crime. Example: "Stop or I'll Baste!": Slob FBI agent is sent undercover to a Provence Cooking School.

Whatever fun set pieces our hero encounters must be shaded to deliver milestones of growth for our kid lead. We always come back to that Golden Fleece truism that can be found in The Odyssey, Gulliver's Travels, and any number of successful road stories through the ages: It's not the incidents, it's what the hero learns about himself from those incidents that makes the story work.

What makes a Golden Fleece story work.