If we were living in a novel, where would we be right now as a human collective?
In novel and movies, in any captivating story, the catalyst is the event, the point in time, where an event occurs that alters the life of the protagonist. It’s the harbinger of change.
The Catalyst is Beat 4 of the 15 beats that screenwriter Blake Snyder identifies in story telling in Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need. It can come as bad news, a divorce, getting fired. It may arrive in the form of seeing the spirit of your dad in the back seat of your car, a Near Death Experience, an alien encounter, a spiritual or creative epiphany. But all catalysts have the same thing in common: you’re kicked out of your status quo thinking and banished from your comfort box, the matrix where you’ve been living.
After Blake’s death, Jessica Brody wrote Save the Cat Writes a Novel, adapting Blake’s 15 beats to novels. In the book, she writes,“The Catalyst will crash land in your hero’s life and create so much destruction, your hero will have no choice but to do something different. Try something new. Go somewhere else.”
Catalysts often involve synchronicity.
Perhaps the catalyst in the story of American democracy was trump’s election to the presidency. He broke all the norms and, ultimately, nearly broke the spine of democracy. Take your pick. Issuing a ban on Muslims entering the country. How a shot of bleach would lick Covid. The J6 insurrection. Two impeachments, 91 indictments. Cozying up to dictators like Putin, Kim Jong Un, his bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen, his pathological lying and narcissism.
In Beat 5, debate, our hero, Democracy, now knows Trump is running for the presidency again and is thinking, Holy shit! What next? Democracy watches a small group of extremists tear apart the Republican Party, which now follows the authoritarian playbook. They can’t break away from Trump. The debate beat will continue into the election of 2024.
In the Save the Cat books, the debate beat leads us into Part 2 of the story. And here, in Beat 6, the hero accepts the call to action. But he has to do this on his own, not because someone else tells him to. Then, with Beat 7, a new character ( or characters) is introduced who will help the hero learn the theme.
The theme here is that Democracy knows he’s is an experiment with a bill of rights, a constitution, separate branches of government, and that his entire persona has been turned upside down by trump, his supporters and co-conspirators. To make things right again, he must fight for his very existence. Perhaps the B characters are the prosecutors like Jack Smith and Connie Willis, and the judges and juries who will hear the cases against trump and the rest of them.
In Beat 8 – Fun & Games – we see Democracy in his new environment. And what’s that going to be?
Then we reach Beat 9, the Midpoint of the story. This culminates in either a false victory or a false defeat for the hero – Democracy!
In Beat 10 – Bad Guys Move In – maybe there’s another insurrection. Or the Republican Party suffers an irreversible meltdown. Or Trump is never charged with anything and really does earn the John Gotti nickname, Teflon Don. Does he then go on to win the election of 2024?
Or perhaps Beat 10 is where we are now, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas atrocities in Israel. Men and women and kids beheaded, hundreds murdered at a music festival, thousands dead, terrorists perpetrating unspeakable cruelty, acts so heinous and inhumane that the rest of the world snaps to attention, appalled. How the hell can human beings do this to each other?
This beat and Beat 11, All Is Lost, melt together.Beat 11 is the lowest point of the novel. Death often occurs here.
Beat 12, Dark Night of the Soul. These moments occur right before our hero, Democracy, decides what to do.
Then the beats lead us into part 3.
My hope is that in Part 3, several things happen. Here in the U.S., I hope Democracy wins the election and trump ends up in prison. In this scenario, he has lost everything that once defined him in his own mind: the real estate, the alleged billions, Mar-a Lago, publicity, his megaphone. My hope is that what happened in Israel is a wake-up call for humanity and that we strive to create a kinder, more aware and interconnected world.
