Jessica Brody is an American novelist and writing teacher, the author of more than twenty novels for teens, tweens, and adults, and the author of the bestselling Save the Cat! novel-writing guides that have become the standard structure reference on the working novelist's shelf since 2018. She is the founder of the Writing Mastery Academy and lives near Portland, Oregon.
Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book on Novel Writing You'll Ever Need (Ten Speed Press, 2018) adapts the late Blake Snyder's Save the Cat screenwriting method to long-form fiction. The book lays out fifteen beats every story needs, from the opening image through the catalyst, the fun and games midsection, the bad guys close in, the dark night of the soul, and the finale, then maps those beats onto ten universal story genres including Monster in the House, Whydunit, Dude with a Problem, Buddy Love, Institutionalized, Fool Triumphant, Out of the Bottle, Rites of Passage, Superhero, and Golden Fleece. Save the Cat! Writes a Young Adult Novel (2020) applies the same framework to YA fiction.
Her novels include the Unremembered trilogy, the System Divine trilogy (a science-fictional reimagining of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables co-written with Joanne Rendell), The Geography of Lost Things, The Chaos of Standing Still, Amelia Gray Is Almost Okay, A Week of Mondays, 52 Reasons to Hate My Father, and I Speak Boy. Several have been optioned for film and television, with Unremembered and 52 Reasons to Hate My Father in development through Reliance Entertainment with producers of Zero Dark Thirty and Slumdog Millionaire. Her books have been translated and published in more than twenty languages.
She also writes the Descendants and LEGO Disney Princess novelizations for Disney. Through the Writing Mastery Academy she teaches Save the Cat! intensives to novelists in person and online, and she travels nationally to lead workshops at writers conferences. Her Story Structure Software at savethecat.com gives writers an online tool for working through the beats on their own books.
