Did Delphine Save the Cat?

Let's go through an analysis of my short story Brigitte and compare it to the beat sheet Save the Cat.

“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:

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The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.

[00:00:00] Last week we learned about beats. Now we are going to save the cat today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello. Hello. Hello. And welcome back to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy who lives in a tiny house who writes stuff and talks about it on a podcast.

The goal of this podcast is to introduce the language of writing of creative writing, help you to develop a process so that you can have a manuscript that is ready to publish, whether you choose to self-publish or [00:01:00] whether you choose to approach an agent and do the traditional route, your manuscript will be ready.

And if you are doing a short story, perhaps you can crank it out in three months. If you are doing a novel, perhaps you can do it in 18 months. And I hope that with this podcast, you can also have the foresight to see if you need to adjust that timeline or not.

So we're going to be talking about my short story, Brigitte that I released back in October, and I wrote that and published it in eight weeks.

It is totally possible to do. Some people are super fast at it. Some people aren't. Hurray for timelines. At the same time, let's use our brains and our wisdom and make sure that we are publishing good things. We talked last week about beats. We talked about what a beat is, that a beat is something in the story.

It is the smallest thing in a story that advances the story, that makes the story [00:02:00] move forward. And it can be an action and inaction. It can be a response. It can also just be a setting, just something like that that makes the plot move forward. And I said, last week that this week we are going to go through what is called a beat sheet.

So it is a collection of beats and how they are organized as a way to just kind of touch base to see if your story is working. Doing this in this way, it makes writing pretty formulaic and there are good and bad qualities to having a formulaic way of writing. First of all, it kind of cranks out things that all resemble each other.

And some people don't like that. At the same time, though, it can be a good tool. I have found. Many of the different things that I do. I'm a person who has like a million different hobbies that the more that I understand the rules of something, the [00:03:00] easier it is for me to naturally incorporate them into what I'm doing.

And it is easier for me to bend or break them and do that with purpose to do that intentionally. And so, while something like Save the Cat is formulaic and mechanical in its approach to creative writing. A few weeks ago, we also talked about the hero's journey, which is very much along these same lines.

It is good to see where the things fall, just because all of these are common points and common events and common things in good stories that have all been successful. I'm not going to pretend that all successful things have each of these beats in them, but as we go through this and compare it to my short story, Bree sheets, we can see that it's all there.

Like it's there. There might be something. May not work. And we'll talk about that. [00:04:00] I did not consult the beat sheet of Save the Cat when I wrote Brigitte back in October. And so this is going to be kind of an experiment for all of us. So Save the Cat was made by a gentleman named Blake Snyder. He died a few years ago, but he was a filmmaker and a screenwriter and Save the Cat is actually the original of it is actually meant for screenplays, but it's all storytelling. And so it applies very strongly to novels. And this goes with a three act structure. And if you remember how I said things a few weeks ago with the three act structure, act one very generally speaking is about 25% of your book. Act two is 50 and then act three is the remaining 25. And so just bear that in mind, as we go through the different [00:05:00] beats of Save the Cat, as we see if Delphine the main character of Bridgette, which was Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor did she save the cat or not?

So yeah, like I said, I did not reference this while I wrote the book. However, we're going to find out together. If these things are all still there, if it's all kind of there. And with the short story, we get to understand that these things are likely all in there somewhere, but condensed. There's not a lot of room in a short story to fill a thing with 15 different beats.

With a novel, when you have a higher word count, it's easier to work in all of the beats. So let's go through and talk about this.

Let's, let's start with act one. Again, act one is the first fourth of the novel or the story.

[00:06:00] So the first beat of Save the Cat is the opening image and it is a snapshot of how the world is. So the first scene of this short story actually takes place at the end of the story. I did one of these really weird framework things where I give you a glimpse at the end of the story as a way to set a tone for the whole story itself. And so Delphine is at the train station.

You can tell that she is on edge. She is tired. She has a bag of money and she is being chased. She is being pursued or at least feels that she is, she's being pursued by a group of people, an unknown group of people. And she is taking her daughter to flee to another city to start a new life. And from there, it's a short scene, but it is a great snapshot of what the entire story is going to be like. It brings [00:07:00] in a lot of questions. It brings in a lot of intrigue and it sets the stage for the entire rest of the story by glimpsing at how the story ends. So that was just kind of a trick there as a way to fulfill this setting the scene.

 Before the story starts or before, like the action of the story happens. So with Bridgette, we have Delphine who is about to deliver her daughter, Bridgette.

She is alone in a monastery and she has a midwife with her. We can kind of get a sense of time and place a little bit from the lack of technology and just this way of delivering a baby. Also she goes through and we talk about the flowers that were delivered to her room from the crone and. We understand that there is contention between Delphine and the crone based on Delphine's attitude toward those [00:08:00] flowers.

And so we get a sense of what her world is like, what her own personal world is like through the various flashbacks that she has while she is in transitional labor. And so, yeah, the opening image is established there. The next beat is the theme is stated a single scene beat in which a statement is made by someone other than the protagonist, that hints at what the protagonist will learn before the end of the story.

So this is more complicated. The thing is all of this is general and so we can make things work and see how it fits. So a statement by someone other than the main character to just kind of show how the main character is going to be or what their circumstances will be and what they want to avoid. In her flashbacks, Delphine reflects on an old friend named Jackleen who had an affair and was kicked out [00:09:00] of their city, who was removed from this priestess hood and lost her status and her place in the city. And so she knew from that experience, that things got to be handled differently with this new pregnancy of hers. The next beat is the setup and this can take place over several scenes, but

we get a sense of the protagonist life and what the world is like with all of its flaws and everything as it is. And so throughout her reflections and throughout her flashbacks, we see Delphine, we see her struggle with her faith. We see her struggle with her place as the high priestess of this church and the struggle that she has with the crone, who is kind of over the priestess program of the city of Brianne.

The next beat is the catalyst, and this is the life-changing event that happens to catapult the [00:10:00] protagonist into this new world or a new way of thinking. So the catalyst was Bridgette herself. So the thing that happens is Delphine has a baby and the delivery almost kills Delphine and it's this new daughter.

The daughter is also a legitimate And it creates a big change in Delphine's world because she wants to keep the history and the origin of her daughter a secret. And they don't understand. She doesn't understand her daughter's abilities. The next beat is a debate. So it's a Multisim beat where the protagonist debates what they will be doing next.

All of this happens in the first chapter, too. Just going through the flashbacks, Delphine finally arrives at the conclusion that she will be protecting her daughter [00:11:00] at all costs and that she will be keeping her daughter away from the crone, especially. Until she comes to understand what it is about her daughter that makes her daughter so dangerous so that things can be dealt with on her terms rather than on the Crone's terms.

The next beat in act one is break into two. It's the scene Where we are catapulted into act two. And the protagonist decides to accept whatever the next actions are going to be. And so there was the moment of insecurity and worry about what would happen to have an illegitimate child, and then to have an illegitimate child with such a dangerous ability.

Brought on more complications. And then the break into two beats is where phene decides to keep her [00:12:00] daughter more of a secret, the origins, a secret so that she can decide. What her daughter is actually all about what her daughter can do and to hide the fact that her daughter is a legitimate.

So let's move on to act two. All of that was act one, act one has a lot of beets. It has a lot of foundational stuff to set the scene for the story act two, the beats are a little bit more broad. one Of the beats for act two is the B story. So it's the B plot with Bridgette and with Devin, we have the subplot of the crone wanting to make money.

We have her little background, we have what she is doing with the enchanted water source found in the basement of the monastery. We have that. The next beat is fun and games. It's where the reader gets to see the protagonist, either shine or flounder in this new world. So there wasn't a lot of [00:13:00] struggle between Delphine and this new world, but there was an amount of figuring out she was with her daughter, Bridgette and Bridgette was playing with toys.

Bridgette was cutting a tooth and any way throughout this process, Delphine pieced it together. What Bridgette little ability is that Bridgette actually SAPs energy from people around her in order to heal herself. And that was why during her traumatic birth, she almost killed her mom. So that's a cool thing.

That's what fun and games are all about. The next beat of act two is the midpoint. It's where the fun and games section either culminates into a false victory or a false defeat. So this is the scene where Delphine and the crone have a confrontation. And it is a short conversation about [00:14:00] how the crone wants to do a ritual on Bridgette in order to find out for herself and therefore publicize what Bridgette can do if she has a gift at all and declare her lineage.

If this were allowed to happen, Bridgette would be ratted out as legitimate and Delphine would be forced out of the city, which the crone wants anyway. In that confrontation, Delphine's stands up to the crone and puts her in her place at the same time though.

The crone gets that last word in it, just as that last stabbing remark that. If Delphine does not comply by a certain day, the crone is going to declare Bridgette to be a bastard, which would ruin Delphine and her family. So moving on to the next bits of act two the bad guys closed in.

So this is right after the false victory. This happens in the story when it Bridgette is [00:15:00] kidnapped and then all is lost. This is Delphine reacting to Bridgette going missing. Aunt, her daughter's reacting to that to Delphina already has a lot of daughters and they were in charge of watching Bridgette and breezy.

Disappeared. So those beets still happened and then all is lost.

All is lost is when the bad guys. Appear to be winning. And so you have the captors of Bridgette over-powering her, of her struggling of her getting away. And then the dark night of the soul is the 12th beats of this entire thing. A dark night of the soul is. Multisim beat in which the protagonist takes time to process everything that's happened so far.

And it is the darkest hour. In, in my short story, Bridgette, this happens pretty rapidly. This is when everything [00:16:00] falls apart. This is when Bridgette falls into the spring, bumps her head. And due to her injury and the nature of the spring combined causes everybody around her to die.

So there's a big commitment there and a huge escalation of stakes. That's what the dark night of the soul is all about. And it is at that point that we break into act three. It's where the protagonist realizes that they must do a thing to fix the story.

So this is when the protagonist deals with the aftermath of this climax of this dark night of the soul. This is when, in my story, it is when Del phene finds breezy. And she goes into the basement of the monastery where this magical spring is located. Bridgette is there, she's wet. She's okay. Due to her own strange and dangerous healing abilities and everyone around her is dead.[00:17:00]

And so Delphine takes a moment to process through all of this and then decides that they need to skip town. And that propels us into act three.

And act three, there are a couple different little parts of, one big beat. The beat is the finale. This is Delphina. Speaking to her daughters revealing the affair that she had. That brought Bridgette into this world. And then her daughter is working in concert to get Delphine and Bridgette out of the city to catch a train to flee away.

So the finale has a lot of different parts. The parts here are gathering the team. Delphine speaks to her daughters. And that is kind of a way of gathering the team, gathering resources, packing a bag, executing the plan. The higher tower surprise is the protagonist spaces, a twist or a surprise that forces them to prove their worth.[00:18:00]

The high tower surprise is not really a part of the finale of my story. There's not really that. The dig deep down is not having a backup plan. The protagonist has to dig deep inside themselves to find the most important weapon of all the strength and courage to overcome their fear or false belief. And then the execution of a new plan.

So all of these are little sub-parts Of this larger beat, that is the finale. And some of those don't 100% apply to my story. I said earlier that Bridgette was not written in reference to Save the Cat, but as we go through and we see the way that the different points play out, you can see that I touched on a lot of these points pretty.

Okay. The points are there and so it is good to know. Beat sheets. It's it is good to know where things happen and where they should happen, so that you can become familiar with that when you are formulating your own stories. And as you're writing also as you're revising. [00:19:00] So these are a good thing to reference while you are doing the revision of your own short stories.

And as we demonstrated, I did pretty okay with this. There are some details in the finale beat that don't 100% apply to my story, but that's okay. I mean, This is a list of 15 beats and they're all there in the story. So that's pretty okay. I did pretty okay with this guys. That is what. Save the cat is all about.

Now we need to visit the title itself, save the cat. Like why are we calling anything? Save the cat when saving a cat is not a beat in the story. And I bring this up at the end on purpose. The guy who came up with saved the cat, he said, in different versions of this beat sheets. You can find these beat sheets kind of everywhere.

If you look up, save the cat beat sheet, you can find some, and they all say similar things. I recommend. [00:20:00] Referencing the original resource material all the time, but you can find beat sheets all over the place. This gentlemen said that one of the things that is missing from most stories, especially nowadays most modern stories, modern films, screenplays novels, is this beats in particular.

And like I said, in the original save the cat, there was a beat called save the cat. And it was the moment where we find that the hero is worth rooting for that the hero is worth cheering for And so I ask you my dear listeners in your experience of reading Bridgette installment, one of tales from late, or did Del phene ever save the cat.

next week, we're going to talk about a few other things with developmental edits inspired by the works [00:21:00] of George Saunders. And so tune in next week for another episode of writing and the tiny house.

Devin Davis:

And that is it for today. Just a reminder that "Brigitte,"Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible and Apple Books as an audio book. And I provide advanced reader copies of these short stories as I release them to my patrons. So become a patron today by visiting patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse to support both my writing and this podcast. And lastly, be sure to follow me on social media. My Instagram is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is@authordevind. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.