Save the Cat and Celebrate the Screenwriter

I NEVER GOT around to reading Blake Snyder's Save The Cat, I guess because I've been working a lot since it was published. Ironically, it was on my to-do list for this month. But I've known enough people who did read it with joy, or who attended one of his seminars, to know that the guy was a force for positivity in this industry -- an inspirational figure who helped a whole lot of word jockeys roll the boulder up the hill.

So his sudden death from cardiac arrest caught me by surprise, same as everybody.

Here's the dirty little secret of teaching screenwriting. It's something that McKee or Snyder or even my buddy Alex can't put in a book in quite this way:

You can't really teach it.

Oh, you can give people tools, like Snyder did. You can instruct, you can talk structure or process to help people along, but the most important part of any working writer is what they have, themselves, in there -- the thing that can't be taught; the thing that's there from the first day they start -- that probably is there, quietly honing themselves through life's petty humiliations and triumphs until the day of that first sale. It goes beyond talent or will. It's the essence of being a writer.

I taught screenwriting at Ryerson University for about ten years. Probably, all told, to a little under five hundred students. And each year the ratio was about the same -- one, or two, or sometimes (rarely) three students had 'it.' That's in my estimation, of course -- and there were definitely a few who surprised me along the way. But only a few. Most of the people I read for the first time as callow nineteen year olds and said, "this person's got it," are writing professionally now. A few of them even made their first sales before I did -- my students' successes kicked my ass to overcome my own fear.

Seeing that rough diamond, and doing whatever you can to polish it, is almost a compulsion. It's just so rare, that you feel honor bound to try and do something to help the person along. The thing about Snyder is he seemed to do that in such a positive, effortless way. His impact in the few short years he was lecturing after his book hit big cannot be overstated.

Because here's the flipside of what I was talking about above: you can never really know for sure about 'it.' Sometimes people need to get past their shit before they can access 'it.' I've had people ask me, flat out, "do I have talent? Am I wasting my time?" And it's the question you can never really answer. Because you can never know for sure -- and who are you to crush somebody's dreams?

Nope. Better to be a force like Blake Snyder, however you can be. You hold in your heart the possibility that anybody really could make it -- even if you know that's not really true. And rather than rage at the "lottery winners" who don't deserve a success, and give in to that negativity, you do your part to bring out the diamond in the rough. Writing is hard. You work to make it less so.

In his last blog entry, Snyder started off with one simple sentence: "I love writers."

He proved it. Every day. "I love writers." Definitely not the worst epitaph for a man who did a lot to inspire people in our business. He'll be sorely missed.