Free Save the Cat! Strikes Back: More Trouble For... by Blake Snyder Page A

Externally, aliens are actually attacking. Internally, we are still clinging to our old beliefs.
    And one by one they are being exposed as false.
    Resistance is not as easy to write as proactive, leading-the-charge, directioned activity that heroes normally exhibit.
    How do you reveal the internal fear of a hero, for whom it's gradually being revealed her old beliefs are wrong? How do you show panic — which most heroes are trying
not
to show?
    That's why BGCI is so tough to write!
    But if you know that's the purpose of that section, it's at least easier to think about, plan, and aim for in your writing. This is disintegration of the old ways, the slow sloughing off of ideas, beliefs, and friendships that are wrong, useless, harmful. The horrible realization that the keyhole is near and you're going through it and there's no escape. We… are… going!
    And that realization begins at the Magical Midpoint.
THE THEME STATED – B STORY CONNECTION
    Why are there so many scenes at Midpoint that involve the “hero kissing a girl,” you may well ask? It's because another intersection that happens here at Midpoint is the A and B Story cross . And since many writers have asked for more on this, there's no time like the present for further elucidat'n’.
    Midpoint is not only where we “raise the stakes” of the hero's A Story, but where we do the same for the B Story. And that's why the boy and girl so often kiss here — or at least come close. I told this “discovery” to an old-time screenwriter once, thinking myself quite brilliant for having figured this out all by myself, only to be told by him: “Oh yeah!‘Sex at Sixty’!” That was the term he and his screenwriting buddies used for the “kiss at the first hour.” It just goes to show that where the basics of storytelling are concerned, nothing changes.
    As suggested, most movies have two intertwining skeins:
    The A Story is the hero's tangible goal, what he wants.
    The B Story is the hero's spiritual goal, what he needs.
    The A Story is what is happening on the surface. It's the plot. The B Story, or what I call the “helper story,” helps push the hero to learn the spiritual lesson that every story is really all about. Most often the B Story is “the love interest” aka “the girl.” The hero enters the upside-down version of the world of Act Two, looks across a crowded room, and there she is — the person who'll help him on his way to transformation, and hold his hand as he dies and is reborn! And, of course, because she can't be with him when they meet (otherwise where'd we have to go?), the process of boy wins girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl back in a poker game, is seen time and again in a thousand forms.
    “The girl” can also be “the mentor.” Check out the B Story of the hit comedy
Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story
. Who's the B Story? Who's the “helper” character that will push hero Vince Vaughn to learn his lesson in leadership? Why it's Rip Torn, as down-and-out ex-dodgeball champ, Patches O'Houlihan! Proof comes when seeing how the B Story beats of that movie line up. We first meet Patches on page 30, when Vince and his team see an old dodgeball instructional film starring the younger Patches (Hank Azaria). At Midpoint, the stakes are raised, and A and B cross, when an older Patches arrives in the flesh and — publicly — tells Vince that he is now the team's coach. Since all mentors go to page 75 to die, Patches does too, giving Vince pause before pushing him to action in Act Three, where Patches even reappears —
en spirito
— to give Vince the ghostly final shove he needs to go on to dodgeball greatness. Rudimentary? Yes. Silly? Of course!
    And yet this basic construct appears again and again.
    Whether the B Story is one person like a love interest, mentor, or sidekick, or a group such as the host of helpers the heroes learnfrom in the Act Two worlds of
Legally Blonde
,
Miss Congeniality
, and
Gladiator
, these B Story pulse