Save the Cat! is a 15-point formula found in many screenplays and movies. Is this formula worthwhile for novelists and short story writers?
Yes, and no, and maybe.
Save the Cat forces you to think about stories as systems of moving parts. This may be a new and necessary insight for many writers.
Most fiction writers know that they need an inciting incident, and a climax/conclusion. Where fiction writers most often struggle is in the vast middle portions of novels (and even long short stories). Save the Cat has remedies for this. The midpoint and “bad guys close in” are concepts that can be profitably employed in any story form.
One can argue that novelists should write with movies and television in mind, anyway. Visual media has affected the expectations that readers bring to fiction, and you ignore this at your peril. Try to write like Melville (or even Saul Bellow) today, and you won’t get far.
That said, stories and novels are fundamentally different from screen-based media. A novel is not a screenplay, just as a screenplay is not a novel. This may be why screen adaptations of novels are seldom satisfactory for viewers who have already read the book.
In particular: the screenwriter’s obsession with scenes and “show don’t tell”. Scenes are the building blocks of any story, but they aren’t the sole building blocks of fiction. All fiction contains some backstory and exposition that simply couldn’t exist in a movie. This is true even of commercial fiction. The “show don’t tell” dictum, when carried to extremes, can become counterproductive. In this regard, it’s a lot like the oft-repeated “no adverbs” rule.
If your goal is to write screenplays, stick with the original Blake Snyder book. If you’re interested in writing fiction, go with the Jessica Brody spinoff, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.
The year is 1938. Betty Lehmann is an undercover German spy. Can anyone stop her? Find out in THE CAIRO DECEPTION, a 5-book, World War II historical fiction series.
The year is 1938. Betty Lehmann is an undercover German spy. Can anyone stop her? Find out in THE CAIRO DECEPTION, a 5-book, World War II historical fiction series.
You’re twelve years old, and trick-or-treating with your two best friends.
You know what they say about the Shipley House. Something very bad happened there in 1959.
For more than twenty years, the Shipley house has stood vacant. No one can live there for long.
You’ve been warned not to enter.
But it’s Halloween, after all. How can you resist?
You try the front door. You’re surprised to find that the Shipley house is unlocked. Almost as if the house has been waiting for you.
You go inside, and walk down the hallway toward the bedroom at the end of the corridor.
Be careful: what you find in that room may drive you mad. And you may discover things about yourself that you don’t want to know.
***
The Shipley house is featured in one of the chapters of 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN, a Gen X coming-of-age supernatural horror tale set on Halloween night, 1980.
Three young friends decide to go out for “one last Halloween before they enter their teenage years. But this will be a Halloween like no other.
12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN is available on Amazon, and you can read it for free in Kindle Unlimited.
Jason Kelley is a college student who agrees to take a walk down the most paranormally active road in Ohio. His mission: to document the phenomena he encounters on the cursed stretch of rural highway.
Along the way he encounters hellhounds, malevolent spirits, and trees that come to life.
If you like traditional supernatural horror tales, you’ll love ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT. Available on Amazon now.
In the spring of 1981, my seventh-grade English teacher assigned our class “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, a short story by James Thurber.
The eponymous lead character is a middle-age man who has gone into a trance in his day-to-day life. Walter Mitty is married, but there is no spark between him and his wife. (The Secret Life of Walter Mitty was published in 1939, before the advent of no-fault divorce.) The story’s sparse 2,000-odd words don’t tell us much more about the details of Mitty’s circumstances, but we can easily imagine him as a low- or mid-level administrative employee in an office somewhere.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947) theatrical release poster
To escape the dullness of his actual life, Walter Mitty retreats into various daydreams. He is alternately a US Navy hydroplane captain, a bomber pilot, and a brilliant surgeon. Mitty’s daydreams of a more glorious existence are inevitably interrupted when someone—often his wife—scolds him for zoning out.
I was twelve years old when I read this story for the first time. I remember enjoying some of the imagery of the story. But as a seventh-grader, I simply could not get my arms around the ennui and resignation that often accompanies middle age. I had not yet been on the planet for thirteen years. Everything was still new to me.
I recently reread Thurber’s story at the age of 57. What a difference 45 years can make, in the way one interprets a work of fiction.
I wouldn’t describe myself as a Walter Mitty. I don’t daydream about flying a navy hydroplane while I’m driving a car, as Mitty does. But at the age of 57, I do understand how a person can become disconnected from the larger world.
American society is forever fixated on the future, and that naturally tends toward a youth obsession. Once you reach a certain age, you tend to fall off society’s radar. People are much more interested in what younger folks are doing.
The flip side of that is that you, in turn, are much less interested in what most other people are talking about. This doesn’t necessarily lead to constant daydreaming. But it does lead to a sense that you are not as fully a part of this world as you once were.
This process might be unavoidable, and it might not be completely unhealthy, either, for aging individuals or for society at-large. Society would never change if the concerns of the same cohort of people forever dominated the zeitgeist. For the individual, gradually losing touch with the world—even in late middle age—might be viewed as an advance preparation for leaving the world entirely.
Anyway, “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” has apparently struck a chord with a lot of people since it was first published. The story was made into a movie in 1947, and then again at 2013.
In the Bicentennial summer of 1976, the Headless Horseman returns from history (and the grave!) to terrorize modern-day America. Can one Ohio teenager stop the carnage?
How I wrote a horror novel called Revolutionary Ghosts
Or…
Can an ordinary teenager defeat the Headless Horseman, and a host of other vengeful spirits from America’s revolutionary past?
The big idea
I love history, and I love supernatural horror tales.“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” was therefore always one of my favorite short stories. This classic tale by Washington Irving describes how a Hessian artillery officer terrorized the young American republic several decades after his death.
The Hessian was decapitated by a Continental Army cannonball at the Battle of White Plains, New York, on October 28, 1776. According to some historical accounts, a Hessian artillery officer really did meet such an end at the Battle of White Plains. I’ve read several books about warfare in the 1700s and through the Age of Napoleon. Armies in those days obviously did not have access to machine guns, flamethrowers, and the like. But those 18th-century cannons could inflict some horrific forms of death, decapitation among them.
I was first exposed to the “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” via the 1949 Disney film of the same name. The Disney adaptation was already close to 30 years old, but still popular, when I saw it as a kid sometime during the 1970s.
Headless Horsemen from around the world
While doing a bit of research for Revolutionary Ghosts, I discovered that the Headless Horseman is a folklore motif that reappears in various cultures throughout the world.
In Irish folklore, the dullahan or dulachán (“dark man”) is a headless, demonic fairy that rides a horse through the countryside at night. The dullahan carries his head under his arm. When the dullahan stops riding, someone dies.
Scottish folklore includes a tale about a headless horseman named Ewen. Ewen wasbeheaded when he lost a clan battle at Glen Cainnir on the Isle of Mull. His death prevented him from becoming a chieftain. He roams the hills at night, seeking to reclaim his right to rule.
Finally, in English folklore, there is the 14th century epic poem, “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. After Gawain kills the green knight in living form (by beheading him) the knight lifts his head, rides off, and challenges Gawain to a rematch the following year.
But Revolutionary Ghosts is focused on the Headless Horseman of American lore: the headless horseman who chased Ichabod Crane through the New York countryside in the mid-1790s.
The Headless Horseman isn’t the only historical spirit to stir up trouble in the novel. John André, the executed British spy, makes an appearance, too. (John André was a real historical figure.)
I also created the character of Marie Trumbull, a Loyalist whom the Continental Army sentenced to death for betraying her country’s secrets to the British. But Marie managed to slit her own throat while still in her cell, thereby cheating the hangman. Marie Trumbull was a dark-haired beauty in life. In death, she appears as a desiccated, reanimated corpse. She carries the blade that she used to take her own life, all those years ago.
Oh, and Revolutionary Ghosts also has an army of spectral Hessian soldiers. I had a lot of fun with them!
The Spirit of ’76
Most of the novel is set in the summer of 1976. An Ohio teenager, Steve Wagner, begins to sense that something strange is going on near his home. There are slime-covered hoofprints in the grass. There are unusual sounds on the road at night. People are disappearing.
Steve gradually comes to an awareness of what is going on….But can he convince anyone else, and stop the Headless Horseman, before it’s too late?
I decided to set the novel in 1976 for a number of reasons. First of all, this was the year of the American Bicentennial. The “Spirit of ’76 was everywhere in 1976. That created an obvious tie-in with the American Revolution.
Nineteen seventy-six was also a year in which Vietnam, Watergate, and the turmoil of the 1960s were all recent memories. The mid-1970s were a time of national anxiety and pessimism (kind of like now). The economy was not good. This was the era of energy crises and stagflation.
Reading the reader reviews of Revolutionary Ghosts, I am flattered to get appreciative remarks from people who were themselves about the same age as the main character in 1976:
“…I am 62 years old now and 1976 being the year I graduated high school, I remember it pretty well. Everything the main character mentions (except the ghostly stuff), I lived through and remember. So that was an added bonus for me.”
“I’m 2 years younger than the main character so I could really relate to almost every thing about him.”
I’m actually a bit younger than the main character. In 1976 I was eight years old. But as regular readers of this blog will know, I’m nostalgic by nature. I haven’t forgotten the 1970s or the 1980s, because I still spend a lot of time in those decades.
If you like the 1970s, you’ll find plenty of nostalgic nuggets in Revolutionary Ghosts, like Bicentennial Quarters, and the McDonald’s Arctic Orange Shakes of 1976.
***
Also, there’s something spooky about the past, just because it is the past. As L.P. Hartley said, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”
For me, 1976 is a year I can clearly remember. And yet—it is shrouded in a certain haziness. There wasn’t nearly as much technology. Many aspects of daily life were more “primitive” then.
It isn’t at all difficult to believe that during that long-ago summer, the Headless Horseman might have come back from the dead to terrorize the American heartland…
Whenever I go to Japan, a book haul is always near the top of my to-do list. Japanese-language books are not impossible to acquire in the United States; but it’s seldom as convenient as placing an order on Amazon.
This title would loosely translate as History of the Showa Era that Citizens Don’t Know.
As the cover image suggests, there are numerous chapters about the Japanese Imperial Navy and World War II.
One of the many rewards of learning a foreign language well is that your potential reading list will be vastly expanded. Some of my favorite books are Japanese-language titles.
Last night I went out for a walk in my neighborhood around 7 pm. (We’ve had an unseasonably warm spell here in the Cincinnati area.) I didn’t take into account how quickly the dusk settles in this late in the year. I was only halfway out when it suddenly became very…well, dark.
I therefore walked back to my house in the dark. The houses around me were festooned with various Halloween decorations: skulls, black cats, and even some cool Halloween projector lights.
I love Halloween. For me, Halloween is the time when we mortals come to terms with two constants of human existence: a.) the unknown, and b.) the inevitability of death.
The celebration of Halloween is an act of acceptance. Our lives will always contain tragedy, dissatisfactions, and uncertainty. But we cannot allow ourselves to paralyzed by fear…or by sadness.
Halloween is a time when we laugh at death, and embrace our mortality.
A few years ago, I wrote a Halloween novel called 12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN. This nostalgic, coming-of-age horror tale is set on Halloween night, 1980. Check it out here.
I’ve been reading Tom Clancy’s 1986 novel, Red Storm Rising.
The book posits a war between NATO and the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
Here’s the odd thing:
Clancy decided to more or less ignore nuclear weapons, making this hypothetical war a solely conventional one. Not a very realistic story choice, but Red Storm Rising would have quickly become a post-apocalyptic novel otherwise.
It’s interesting reading, if you like long battle scenes and the other books in Tom Clancy’s oeuvre.
If you want to maintain your abilities in a foreign language, you have to use the language regularly. And one of the best ways to practice a foreign language is by reading.
Forget the “apps”—read an old-fashioned book.
(Note: Yes, certain apps can be helpful when you are first learning a language. I’m not anti-app. But once you’re proficient, real-world materials will help you make the most progress. If you’ve been studying a language for years, you should be well beyond the Duolingo stage.)
I first read Pet Sematary—in English—in 1984. Back then, the book was new to all readers, and widely billed as, “the novel that scared Stephen King while he was writing it.”
Like The Dead Zone, which I recently discussed, I remembered the basic plot line and main characters of Pet Sematary. But I have forgotten enough to make the book entertaining the second time around. Also, when I first read this novel, I was a teenager. I’m now in my mid-50s. That makes a big difference.
What about the Spanish?
I sometimes get tongue-tied when chatting in Spanish, but my reading and aural comprehension abilities are quite high. I can read just about any modern text in Spanish, with only an occasional reference to a dictionary.
Lest this strike you as braggadocio, I will also point out that I had my first exposure to Spanish as a high school student more than 40 years ago. I took one year of intermediate Spanish in college. I used Spanish on the job during frequent trips to Mexico in the 1990s and 2000s.
My Spanish is good, by the standard gringo yardstick, and it should be, after all this time. I’m not a language-learning virtuoso, by any means. But I am a dedicated language learner, and one who has been at it for a number of years now.
I recently received an email from a reader of 12 Hours of Halloween, asking me about “Devil’s Night” and the 1980s. The reader wanted to know if I participated in any Devil’s Night mayhem as a youth.
For those of you who don’t know the term: Devil’s Night, aka Damage Night, or Mischief Night, is traditionally the night before Halloween, October 30.
The observance apparently dates back tothe 1790s. In the 1800s, this was a night when children engaged in innocent pranks, like soaping neighbors’ windows.
But nothing remains innocent for long, does it? By the time I was a kid, in the late 1970s, Devil’s Night had acquired a bad reputation. This was largely owing to the destructive arson sprees that took place in cities like Detroit on October 30, starting in the 1960s.
Strait-laced suburban youth that I was, I wanted no part of any of that. Nor did I hear much about such pranks during my trick-or-treating years. I think a few kids may have toilet-papered trees. But that’s about the extent of it.
My maternal grandfather, mid-1930s
In my personal circle, I have been acquainted with exactly one person who admitted to serious Devil’s Night misconduct: my maternal grandfather.
My maternal grandfather (who loved Halloween) was one of my favorite people. He was also a World War II veteran.
But before all of that, he was a youth in rural Southern Ohio, on the westernmost fringes of Appalachia. He grew up in the 1930s. And if you think those were innocent times, then you’ve been watching too many episodes of The Waltons.
On Devil’s Night, my grandfather and his friends used to engage in some marginally malicious hijinks. Much of this consisted of tipping over outhouses
My grandfather told me about one Devil’s Night on which a crotchety old man (who was the bane of local children) fired a shotgun at him and his friends in the dark.
No one was harmed. According to my grandfather, though, the man had fired his shotgun with the intent of doing serious bodily injury to the trespassers. (And they had just tipped over his outhouse.)
Do I approve of what my grandfather and his friends did that night? No, of course not. But I’m quite grateful that that old man’s aim was off. Otherwise, I might not be here to write this post.
-ET
**12 HOURS OF HALLOWEEN**
Halloween night 1980 will be unlike any other!
On Halloween night 1980, three young friends face the perils of a supernatural curse.
Their familiar suburban environment is transformed into a nightmare hellscape of witches, evil spirits, and unimaginable creatures.
A terrifying coming-of-age tale for Generation X, or anyone nostalgic for the 1980s!
Throughout the world, people who make Internet inquiries about Kuwa6226 meet violent deaths.
In online forums and chatrooms, people are warned not to mention the mysterious entity.
But who, or what, is Kuwa6226? A supernatural force? A cult? A global conspiracy?
Most people say that it’s better not to ask…and Kuwa6226’s reign of terror goes unchallenged.
***
Then two unlikely sleuths, from opposite sides of the world, unite.
Minoru Watase is a corporate IT employee in Japan. Julie Lawrence is a college student in the American Pacific Northwest.
Julie and Minoru have each lost a friend to Kuwa6226. Together, they are determined to discover Kuwa6226’s true identity and eliminate the menace.
Their search will take them from the streets of Tokyo to an American college town in Washington State. When they finally come face-to-face with Kuwa6226, Julie and Minoru will be unprepared for the revelation…and the ruthlessness of their adversary!
Kuwa 6226 is a horror-mystery with endless twists and turns!
I can recall the first time that I was actually scared by something that I read.
It was the summer of 1977. Somehow a book of short horror stories had come into my possession: Stories of Ghosts, Witches, and Demons. This slender 80-page volume, edited by Freya Littledale, was published by Scholastic in 1971.
Although I read the book cover-to-cover, I have forgotten all of the stories—except one: an especially creepy tale called, “The Demon of Detroit”.
This is the story of a married couple, Mr. and Mrs. Adams, who move into a house in the Motor City. They soon discover that they aren’t alone. Something horrible inhabits their back bedroom.
After a series of disturbing events, the couple decides to move out of the house. The last lines of the story are particularly haunting: They indicate that the Adamses “admit defeat”. Whatever lurks in the back bedroom will now have the rest of the home to itself, too.
The full text of the story (along with a clip of the artwork appearing in the original Scholastic publication) is available online. I do recognize the artwork. I can’t say for certain if the transcription of the 1971 text is one hundred percent faithful. (I was nine years old in 1977, after all.)
“The Demon of Detroit” seems to be based on an urban legend from the 1960s, which has enjoyed a modest contemporary revival. Urban legends, I’ve found, often make good source material for horror films and short stories, because urban legends are instantly relatable and easy to grasp. They aren’t overly complex. That’s important in horror film and fiction.
“The Demon of Detroit” also demonstrates the effectiveness of the short form in horror. This short story is perhaps a thousand words long. Obviously, they won’t all be that short. But as a rule of thumb with horror: the longer the story, the harder it is to maintain the suspension of disbelief. (Notice that Poe, Lovecraft, and even Stephen King are at their best when writing in the short form.)
“The Demon of Detroit” is a story that begins with a subtle atmosphere of darkness, and builds, over about a thousand words, to something truly malevolent.
“The Demon of Detroit” scared the bejesus out of me in 1977. I reread it today (the online version). It still brings a chill to my spine, forty-eight years later.
This is a question I received the other day on Twitter.It isn’t a frivolous question, I suppose. About a third of my titles are classified as horror, after all.
Perhaps I should begin by clarifying what kind of horror I don’t write.
I don’t do excessive gore/violence.
I have never been interested in horror fiction that fetishizes violence and cruelty for the mere sake of wallowing in such things. (If that’s your goal, then why not just watch one of those ISIS beheading videos?)
This means that graphic depictions of torture (for example) don’t appear in my books. Cannibalism is pretty much out, too. (Gross.)
I’m old enough to remember the capture of Jeffrey Dahmer in 1991. Suffice it to say that I am not interested in exploring the most extreme possibilities of human depravity in fiction. Again, what’s the point?
Are you into “splatterpunk”? You probably won’t like my books. Do us both a favor, and read something else.
I don’t like horror tales with unlikable characters.
Likewise, I don’t care for horror stories that simply involve horrible things happening to horrible people.
You’ve certainly seen horror movies that involve the following scenario (or something like it): A group of obnoxious, unlikable people enter a house, and they’re killed off one by one.
But the thing is…you don’t care! The protagonists were all awful people, anyway. (Maybe you were even rooting for the monster.)
I don’t do comedy-horror.
Do you like the Zombieland movies? My horror fiction probably isn’t for you.
I love comedy films—Airplane, Blazing Saddles, etc. Cheers from the 1980s can still make me laugh.
But horror is serious business. There can be moments of levity amid the darkness. There are many of these in some of Stephen King’s novels. (Cujo and The Stand stand out in this regard.) But when the monsters come out, it’s all business. Monsters are serious.
***
So what kind of horror do I write, then?
My influences are Stephen King, Peter Straub, and the campfire ghost stories of my youth.
I have always been fascinated by urban legends. I am endlessly interested in the dark house at the end of the lane, the one that all the kids say is haunted.
A good horror story should involve characters that you care about. If you don’t care about the characters, then you won’t care if the monster gets them.
A good horror story should involve redemption. The evil is defeated in the end. Or some crucial lesson is learned. Or the human condition is in some way illuminated.
Redemption is a key element of most of the horror stories that we love best. The salvation of Mina Harker at the end of Dracula. The closing scene of The Stand, in which Frannie Goldsmith and Stu Redman wonder aloud if people ever really learn from their mistakes. The last scene in The Dead Zone, in which the shade of Johnny Smith assures Sarah that nothing is ever really lost, nothing that can’t be found.
Note that redemption doesn’t necessarily mean a happy ending. But there has to have been a point to it all.
***
I like ghosts, monsters, things that go bump in the dark. My sainted grandmother was a direct descendant of immigrants from County Cork, Ireland. And every Irishman (even a diluted, generations-removed Irishman like me) loves a good ghost tale.
Let me give you some examples. Here are a few of my horror novels, to date:
Eleven Miles of Night
A college filmmaker takes a walk down a notoriously haunted road, in order earn a $2,000 fee for documenting the phenomena he sees.
This novel contains ghosts, demonic beings, and a long-dead witch who inhabits a covered bridge. Oh, yeah—and hellhounds!
On Halloween night, 1980, three adolescent friends go out for “one last Halloween”. But they have been cursed by an entity known as “the ghost boy”. As a result, their familiar neighborhood is transformed into a supernatural landscape filled with vampires, wayward spirits, and trees with minds of their own.
In the summer of 1976, an Ohio teenager named Steve Wagner discovers that the Headless Horseman has returned to terrorize twentieth-century America. The Horseman has brought other ghosts back with him, including the once beautiful (but now hideous) Marie Trumbull, an executed Loyalist.
I have others; but these are the three you might check out first. They are usually enrolled in Kindle Unlimited, which means you can read them for free if you subscribe to that service.
