“If my story’s main character is a ‘bad guy,’ do they need a ‘Save the Cat’ moment?”

From Mragendra Singh:

Hi Scott,

I have a character related question. Like they always says when the main character is introduced people should instantly like him or rather relate to him (i.e. “Save The Cat” moment).

Now my question is if the main character is a bad guy and he has no redeeming quality, or say the main character is just a normal selfish guy who just cares about himself, do we still need to create that moment?

Cheers
Mragendra

I have a confession to make: I’ve never read anything Blake Snyder, author of “Save the Cat,” has written. I have heard nothing but great things about him personally as well as praise — generally — for his approach to screenwriting, but my answer to this question will be second-hand in nature.

Specific to the idea of “save the cat,” here is what Wikipedia has to say about it from Snyder’s page:

The title Save the Cat! is a term coined by Snyder and describes the scene where the audience meets the hero of a movie for the first time. The hero does something nice — e.g. saving a cat — that makes the audience like the hero and root for him. According to Snyder, it is a simple scene that helps the audience invest themselves in the character and the story, but is often lacking in many of today’s movies.

Given Hollywood’s fixation on creating ‘sympathetic’ Protagonists, it’s easy to see how valuable a save the cat type of moment early on in a script can be. But for a Nemesis, the question would seem to boil down to this: Do you want a reader to feel sympathy for this character or not? If their primary function is to oppose the Protagonist, more than likely you would want the reader to dislike the Nemesis. In that case, perhaps it would be best for them not to save the cat, but whack the cat.

There are all sorts of movies featuring scenes where the Nemesis grievously injures someone or something before their Final Struggle with the Protagonist, a visual way of establishing how ‘bad’ they are and the type of violence of which they are capable.

So depending upon the type of Nemesis character with which you are working, what their relationship is to the Protagonist, and what their primary function is in relation to the Plotline, you may not want to have them save the cat, instead you may want them to whack the cat.

On the other hand, I have mentioned an anecdote before involving Clint Eastwood. I do not have a specific reference for this, don’t know the movie, only something I have heard and have never been able to corroborate, but as it illustrates a good point, I will repeat it here.

As the story goes, Clint was in Italy starring in one of the many spaghetti westerns he did early in his career. In this particular movie, he plays a ‘bad guy,’ a cold-blooded killer. But he is also the central character in the movie, one for whom the viewer is supposed to end up rooting.

So the opening scene. A wide expanse of parched land. In the distance, a lone figure riding on his horse. It’s Clint’s character. Both he and the horse are covered with dust, bone-weary from a long ride. They approach a watering hole. Clint dismounts. Approaches the water. Dips his hat into it to scoop some up to drink. He raises the hat. Then before he takes a drink, he offers the water to the horse first.

Boom! Immediate sympathy for the character through one simple gesture. And the way I heard the story, that was Clint’s improvisation on the script.

Again I don’t know if the story is true, but it shows how a save the cat type moment can create at least a temporary sense of sympathy / connection for a ‘bad guy.’

There is a larger issue here as far as I’m concerned which is this: save the cat, whack the cat, whatever the writer chooses to do, if that choice derives outside the scope of who the character is — that is the writer’s choice, not the character’s — the writer runs a substantial risk of creating an inauthentic moment and in so doing losing the reader. Decisions like this must derive from inside the character, a choice they make, not the writer. Otherwise the writer is just forcing something onto a character to fill some perceived story need. And frankly, that makes for bad writing.

Everything comes from the characters. What they do, what they say, the plot arising from the interplay of who they are and their goals — everything. Therefore as a writer, you must respect your characters and their own rules of engagement: beliefs, world views, personalities, tendencies, habits, fears and all the rest, these are theirs, not yours. Any time you lay on some type of beat ala “Now I need to give them a save the cat moment,” if that doesn’t arise naturally from within the character, an honest, authentic expression of who they are, you are doing a disservice to the character and ultimately creating a fraud.

Rather go into your characters, immerse yourself in who they are, discover the multiple aspects of their psyche, and identify what is at their Core Of Being. In that process, you will no doubt find some elements of their persona with which a reader can sympathize. Then and only then should you look to create a beat in the story to sell that sympathy. Nothing wrong with that because what you are selling comes from within the character, not the writer’s need to fulfill some goal of an external structural construct which can come off within the story universe as artificial, manipulated, and ultimately fake.