Jasper.ai Recipe: Save The Cat! Beat Sheet

Full video transcript

What’s going on guys, Darby here, and today I’m bringing to you a new recipe that we’ve been developing for quite some time, developed in collaboration with Lynn South, who I’m going to be working with inside of this demonstration video of how to use the recipe to develop an outline for her second book in a series that she’s working on right now. So if you want access to the recipe, just go to theaiauthor.com and subscribe. It’ll be inside of our library of resources, and make sure you subscribe here on YouTube as well so that you get notified whenever we do new trainings, new videos, new spotlights on our community members. And until then, sit back, relax, and enjoy the recipe.

Hey, what’s going on guys, Darby here with AI Author. Today I am joined by Sherry South, who has been hard at work — she’s a fiction writer, hard at work working on a Save the Cat recipe. Now, Save the Cat’s a cool kind of like a beat sheet process to help give a really high-level overview of what the story’s going to look like: short stories, novels, novellas, things of that nature. And so we’re going to be exploring how we can use Save the Cat paired with Jasper in developing an outline, or an overview, about book two that she has in the works right now. Sherry, thank you so much for coming on and sharing with us this recipe. And why don’t you just give us a little bit of background about you, how you got into writing, your history with books, and what we’re going to be working on today.

Perfect, great, thanks for inviting me on Darby, I appreciate it. How did I get into writing? I’ve been a writer pretty much my whole life, from the time I was a kid, and kind of been in and out of it for a while. I really rededicated myself to the craft about 10 years ago. I got some really lovely rejection letters on my first book, which was a science fiction time travel kind of light sci-fi adventure, from some really lovely literary agents, and decided maybe self-publishing, indie publishing is something for me because I like the degree of control that I have around it. So I published my first book in 2020 and I’m working on book two and some other projects with a small publisher at the moment. I write under the pen name Lynn South — Lynn is my middle name.

And I fell into Jasper last year and realized that it was a great brainstorming tool to come up with different ideas and to just get my brainstorming juices going. I’m also an editor and a book coach, and somebody who does brainstorming with other authors on a regular basis, so using this tool, Jasper, to kickstart my own idea process has really fed into getting a little sharper with my fiction writing, a little faster. The other day I wrote 4,000 words in about two hours with Jasper, and they were pretty good words. For fiction writers it’s a little harder to get Jasper to do what we want, but it’s fun too — it’s really exciting to see what it can do with material that you’ve given it.

So one of the things that I joke with all of my writer friends about is that I am a course and a tool and a writing craft book junkie — if it’s out there, I’m probably going to buy it. But this was probably one of the smarter purchases in the last couple of years. One of the tools I use pretty regularly is the Save the Cat beat sheet, which sets up the emotional and action beats throughout the story at a macro level — not really at a micro, chapter level yet — but it really helps to get, on paper so to speak, the structure of a story so that you can then delve into the details and get an idea for what direction you want the story to go, or what you don’t want to write. So it’s been a real adventure so far, and I’m looking forward to the rest of it.

When Darby and I first started talking about Save the Cat, I said, you know, the Hero’s Journey is a great story structure for a lot of stories, but it doesn’t fit everything. And Save the Cat, which this particular recipe also has, is kind of a hybrid from some other elements. I use the free structure that author Jamie Gold has on her website for the outline for this recipe, and tweaked it and went through and rewrote some of the different commands that I thought might work with Jasper. But it is definitely a work in progress, and I’m looking forward to working through and making sure that we can get this refined to the point where it will help other fiction authors get a jumpstart on their writing so they can get to the meat of their story a little faster, which is kind of the purpose of brainstorming.

Absolutely, and I played around with the tool for a few story beats as well, and I thought it worked great for having a very limited knowledge of this type of writing and outlining, so I’m really looking forward to diving in, kind of blank slate right now with you, on what we were talking about. You have book one, right, which is the time-travel theme — give us a little context of that because we’re going to be working on book two, and so this is kind of the precursor.

From there, Darby and Sherry move into the live demonstration: opening the recipe inside Jasper, discussing how specific description and context help Jasper generate more useful output, and working command by command down the Save the Cat beat sheet — starting with a list of opening image ideas, choosing between the options Jasper generates (and rejecting ones that don’t fit), and continuing through the beat sheet toward later commands, including one near the end of the recipe that has Jasper draft a book blurb. Along the way they talk through what makes a command work well with Jasper for fiction versus other types of writing, and how tweaking and fine-tuning the wording of a command changes the quality of what Jasper returns.

Toward the end of the session, Sherry reflects on her own writing journey: her first book took about 10 years to write, and after finishing the first draft — originally told from a different character’s perspective, with the character who became the protagonist originally written as the antagonist — she realized she liked that character more and rewrote the book from the ground up. It’s now published, and she describes it as worth every bit of the pain that went into it. Her word of advice to other writers: keep writing, and don’t let anyone tell you to stop or give up.

Darby closes the session noting they’re still just at the surface of what this recipe can do, and that anyone interested in giving it a spin can find it inside the AI Author cookbook membership along with dozens of other recipes built by community members — writers of fiction, nonfiction, YouTube scripts, blogs, book blurbs, and more. He adds that Jasper is just a tool to help facilitate getting words out into the world; it’s still on the writer to get to the point of clicking publish. Sherry thanks Darby for having her on, and shares that people can find her at lynnsouth.com.