Something Startling Happens: The 120 Story Beats Every Writer Needs to Know

by Todd Klick

Klick's book reveals the 120 minutebyminute story genome that unites all successful films. In other words, it shows filmmakers what makes a great movie ticklike no other book has done before.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Film

242 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Todd Klick is an award-winning screenwriter, producer, and author. Klick is best known for writing the social media horror film Followed, which reached the top of the box office in June of 2020 during the U.S. Covid pandemic drive-in theater resurgence. Before that, Followed won numerous festival awards, including a nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Klick. Todd also authored the non-fiction books Something Startling Happens and Beat By Beat and has published articles in The Huffington Post, MovieMaker Magazine, and The Daily Beast.

Reviews

[Deb Montague · Rating 3 out of 5]

It started out well. There are some insights on points within a movie which seem to be universal. But as I read on, the deconstruction of a movie into minute by minute phrases became hackneyed. It's hard to come up with 120 names for each minute, and movies don't follow the formula listed by the author. There are moments where every movie needs to hit a certain plot element, but those can't be broken into the precise minute for all movies. The half-way point in a 2 hour movie is minute 60. In a 95 minute movie, it's minute 47. That's 13 minutes of difference and you could blow your whole structure in a 95 movie if you wait that long for a half-way point. And, after minute 110, even the author admitted the minute names were lacking in detail.
So, for me, just as with Save the Cat, this is a book I've read to understand another point of view to screenwriting. I'm not sure the formula presented would create an interesting story. It will be on the shelf, should I struggle with what to do to get through a script, but I won't use this as a guide to writing my stuff.

[Matthew Garvey · Rating 1 out of 5]

A stunning accomplishment in the Human Mind's capacity for Confirmation Bias (https://yourbias.is/confirmation-bias)

For anyone even mildly interested in thinking objectively and critically about things sometimes, even as a fun exercise, it becomes clear pretty quickly that the "beats" (which, btw, is stubbornly forced into the narrative of "during literally this minute of the runtime, this specific thing happens, like, almost all the time! 😱") mentioned in the title almost all wind up taking the form:

"Something, involving one or more characters, is said/occurs which causes one or more characters to react in some way. Let's look at some examples: ..."

Thanks for the insight.


They usually try to insist something more specific is happening "that minute", but if you look at all the examples the author himself provides, you can see how abstractly he considers the aspects of:

the "something" (which might actually be the absence of something, if he feels like it),

the "involving" (which might actually be something that no one but the audience ever finds out about, if he feels like it),

the "characters" (which he mentions at the beginning of the book that, for the purposes of this... Framework, he's going to count inanimate objects, characters' individual body parts/thoughts/ideals, the audience, the surrounding environment, etc. as "characters"...),

the "occurs" (which might actually be something that's been the case for quite a while, or even most of the movie, by now (and not something that just happened "this minute"), if he feels like it),

the "react" (which might actually just be an ambient change in the circumstances or stakes which no one has a perceivable reaction too, if he feels like it),

and even the specificity of whatever they're insisting is happening (this also gets a similar loosey-goosey treatment, I think (having read the book cover-to-cover myself))


But besides all that, he's got it down to a science (https://yourbias.is/the-barnum-effect)


This reminds me of how people talk about Harry Potter Houses, numerology, MBTI Types, fortune cookies, and Horoscopes

You can take the daily Horoscope fortunes from the newspaper and scramble which fortune goes with which sign. No one would notice or care and it would literally make no difference to anything whatsoever

It's mostly nonsense which is mostly harmless. Mostly (depending on how serious a given practitioner is (or if they get the idea that the same caliber/style of Critical Reasoning is appropriate to apply to other areas of their life (like how they manage their interpersonal relationships, for example...)))


Oh I forgot to mention: I took the liberty of watching the movie Todd Klick wrote, Followed. It was better than this book (I found it on Tubi)

Anyway, when I'm curious about breaking down a film's genome, I use https://tvtropes.org/

It might not be perfect, but I think it's a much more insightful, thoughtful resource than this

[Marie · Rating 2 out of 5]

1.5 stars.

[Gemini Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now I'm not a screenwriter but I am an author and as a writer I am always on the lookout for books that will contribute to my writing arsenal, and for helpful tools to share with the other writers I teach. Having been handed a copy of this book by a friend it sat on my bedside table for a month, mainly because I was too busy writing! When I finally picked it up I was engrossed.

Despite not being a screenwriter, and, perhaps, therefore having a different perspective, I can boldly say that this book is not solely for those looking to craft their writing skills for screen. Although the book is broken down minute-by-minute, I imagine you could easily apply the emotion-inducing techniques to a play, novel, comedy or even a webisode.

The book does tend to focus on drama's/thrillers with a scattering of comedic examples. My advice is if you are writing a fiction anything, then get yourself a copy of this book. It gently takes you out of the head of the writer and into the mind of the audience, which, in my opinion, is exactly where you should be focused when you are writing. Todd's book is a fantastic contribution to the world of writing.

[Jen Grisanti · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book by author, Todd Klick. The value you get is that Todd took the time to examine and analyze film from an executive perspective of story and then he figured out the commonalities of every outstanding film and what happens on each page of the story. He passes this on to the reader. So, if you're a screenwriter, this is a book that you do not want to miss. It will elevate your writing.

[Jazz Virk · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a few books that I re-read every time I'm writing. This is one of them.