10: Author and Save the Cat! Expert C. David Milles

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How Blake Snyder’s beat sheets can help us structure our personal histories
C. David Milles is a teacher by day and author by night. After stumbling onto Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! books, Milles began to incorporate the screenwriter’s lessons in his novels and the way he taught middle school English. His keen understanding of story structure landed him a gig as a contributor for the popular Save the Cat! website, where Cory breaks down components of current and past movies to show their inner workings—a great exercise for storytellers in all media. In this episode, he shares how the Save the Cat! system can help us find the story structure in our personal history books.

How I Learned to Write Life Stories, Part 2

I found some examples of life story books. Now what? In part 1 of this post, I talked about how important it was for me to find life story books that other people have written. Before this, I wasn’t sure what a personal history should look like. That’s troublesome when you sit down to write […]

How I Learned to Write Life Stories, Part 1

Or, How do I write a life story if I don’t know what a life story is? Here’s a standard piece of advice every writer or writer-hopeful hears: “Read the kind of books you want to write.” Want to write romance? Read romance novels. Memoirs? Go stock up on Mary Karr, Cheryl Strayed, Frank McCourt. But […]