Some of you may be familiar with Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat, in which he lays out the important steps for hitting all the required elements in a screenplay.

For those who are not familiar with this book, I would highly recommend you read it before tackling your next script.

What I want to focus on here is a template I created based on his suggestions for architecting the story before sitting down and starting to write. Given my business experience as a project manager, I am always looking for useful tools that help me compile all the critical elements. So, I took Blake’s ideas and built the following template with two tabs for

1) Story Beats:

2) Storyboarding:

Note the color coding to identify shared elements, and where they correspond on the board.

For example, Act I > II > III breaks, the Midpoint/All is Lost moments, and how the Opening/Final images should be mirror opposites, plus explanatory information captured in the cell comments:

In my experience, the Catalyst is the key element, as it is the pivotal event that changes the protagonist’s life forever and sets up the rest of the story:

Then, you must decide what genre your story is set in.

I created a dropdown box, and several columns over are listed the choices with Blake’s explanations:

Moving on to the storyboard, some explanation is required for the structure:

Scene and action are straightforward, but what does Blake mean by: +/- and > The +/- is how the scene turns from positive to negative or vice versa, and >

The following filled-in example is from my Final Countdown redux board:

This format is not hard and fast, nor is the writing process. When writing, the story can evolve from what was originally planned and laid out in the beats/board as new creative ideas emerge. You do not have to be handcuffed by your architecture. Let your creative energy flow and update your beats/board as your story evolves organically. Nor does the file structure need to remain rigidly fixed.

In my Star Trek: Risa file, I added additional tabs to organize critical information, such as character bios spanning various Starfleet personnel across departments (Section 31, Intelligence, Medical, Engineering) and alien races.

Additionally, I created a timeline in order to ensure canonical consistency so that events in my story progress correctly, where the highlighted/red text cells correspond to real events from the Enterprise era series in which my story is set:

Quick note on the birthdays tab: an homage to the numerous actors from the various Star Trek franchises, where I selected suitable birthdates where my scenes overlap in the timeline.

I hope this helps other screenwriters out there to systematically organize their story ideas.

Good writing!

Let's hear your thoughts in the comments below!

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