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 […]

What we can learn from the movies

Documentary filmmaker Zeva Oelbaum was in Kansas City yesterday for a screening of her new film, Letters from Baghdad. She answered questions afterward, including mine about how she and fellow filmmaker Sabine Krayenbühl created the structure to tell the life story of Gertrude Bell, the film’s subject. Her thoughtful response pointed out a few ways […]