Beating the Story Read online

  More likely, you’ll find yourself adopting a middle position where any moment noteworthy enough to appear in your outline (if you use one), or a summary of your freely composed initial draft (if you don’t), counts as a beat.

  In the case of dramatic forms, actors and directors breaking down dialogue scenes may treat every shift in a character’s tactics or emotions as a separate beat. Although writers can gain enormously from understanding the performer’s approach to scene study, that level of detail occurs while writing, not outlining. In a dramatic exchange, you can generally treat the whole of any interaction between any pair or set of characters as a single beat. A new beat mostly starts when the participating characters change. Now and then, in analyzing long dialogue scenes, you may determine that the characters have switched to an entirely new conflict, and that a new beat has begun even though the participants in the scene have not changed. This pertains particularly to theatrical writing, where many shifts of intention and emotion occur while the characters prowl the same set together.

  A beat resolves or concludes in a way that increases the reader’s hope or fear. If it doesn’t warrant an up or down arrow, it might not be a beat.

  Conversely, you may see that an event is important enough or of sufficient duration to include on your outline or diagram despite its lack of emotional impact. If a moment clearly counts as a separate beat to you, include it, despite its neutral register, marking it with a lateral arrow.

  Foundation Beats

  Two types of beats serve as the workhorses of any narrative. The vast majority of beats in a well-wrought narrative fit into one category or the other. For this reason the beat analysis system categorizes them as foundation beats.

  Dramatic

  A Dramatic beat shows one character pursuing an inner need for emotional reward, which she seeks from another character. The character seeking the reward is making a petition to the other and is thus called the petitioner. The second character may or may not choose to grant the reward and is thus called the granter. In the bullet points below, the name of the petitioner appears in boldface and the granter in italics.

  Lear (the petitioner) seeks flattery from his daughter Cordelia (the granter).

  Carole (the petitioner) wants romantic commitment from Susan (the granter).

  Jin (the petitioner) wants Quan (the granter) to acknowledge his accomplishments.

  Cersei (the petitioner) wants Jaime (the granter) to agree with her plan to vanquish her enemies.

  The emotional outcome of the scene depends on which character or characters we identify with.

  If our focus character acts as petitioner and the granter gives her what she wants, the scene concludes on an up note. Likewise, if the focus character is the granter and we don’t want her to give in, her rebuffing of the character probably plays as an up note.

  A dramatic down note occurs when our focus character acts as petitioner and is rebuffed by the granter, or when the focus character acts as granter and says yes to an approach we’d rather see her rebuff. You might also count as a down note a scene in which we identify as the granter when she stands her ground, but has paid a high emotional price for it.

  A Dramatic beat might end in crossed arrows if:

  we sympathize with both petitioner and granter and will be equally unhappy to see either of them prevail over the other

  the focus character succeeds in getting something we know she shouldn’t want

  the focus character rebuffs a petition we want her to accept

  Procedural

  In a Procedural beat the focus character confronts an external obstacle, dealing with it in a practical and/or physical manner. The character either overcomes the obstacle or is overcome by it. In either case, the outcome of the confrontation puts her in a new situation, either better or worse than it was before.

  The football player attempts a penalty kick.

  The safecracker tries to open a safe.

  The performer tries to wow the producers at a make-or-break audition.

  The high school student runs to escape the monster’s clutches.

  A dialogue scene in which the focus character wants something practical or external from a secondary character, without valuing the secondary character enough to want an emotional reward, can also be read as a procedural scene.

  The spy flusters the desk clerk with his rugged smile, allowing him to look at the room number on her computer monitor.

  The cop intimidates the crook into giving up his accomplice.

  A chattering fan beleaguers our hero as she tries to make it through airport security.

  A character who appears only long enough to resist the focus character is in all probability taking part in a Procedural beat.

  Finding Your Mix

  Procedural beats dominate genre storytelling. Most if not all of the foundation beats in dramas and literary fiction will be dramatic.

  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a play about a husband and wife who emotionally dismantle each other over the course of an evening as a younger couple looks on in horror, exclusively presents us with Dramatic beats.

  If your story only concerns itself with interactions between people, you may likewise entirely omit Procedural beats. It will never attempt to generate suspense with a fight, car chase, or struggle to survive in the wilderness.

  Yojimbo, the Akira Kurosawa film about a stoic, masterless samurai who destroys a town’s gangsters by pitting them against one another, arguably includes no Dramatic beats. In this it takes its cue from its source, Red Harvest, a novel by Dashiell Hammett, who specialized in withheld emotion.

  Over the past three to four decades, Dramatic beats have come to take an increasingly larger role in genre storytelling. (This may or may not spring from a misguided effort, discussed previously, to invest iconic heroes with the traits of dramatic protagonists.) A story that turns on the conquest of external obstacles may nonetheless consist of parallel threads, one procedural and the other dramatic.

  Information Beats

  Three interrelated beats engage your readers by providing them with the information they need to understand and invest in your story. These may relate to:

  Events that took place before your action begins, but nonetheless inform it. Oedipus Rex opens as its titular ruler laments a plague on his city of Thebes. In the course of Sophocles’ play (spoiler!) we learn that in response to a prophecy of doom his father Laius ordered him killed when he was an infant, that he survived to be adopted by a neighboring king, and that upon reaching adulthood he returned to Thebes, slaying Laius and later marrying his queen, Jocasta—that is, Oedipus’ mother. That’s backstory.

  In science fiction and fantasy, the details of your imagined setting, insofar as it departs from our own.

  In historical fiction, information about the past required to understand the narrative, from political events to the details of everyday life.

  In a techno-thriller, facts about contemporary geopolitics, military procedures, and weaponry that may be unknown to the reader.

  In a mystery, information about forensics and investigative procedure.

  In a story set in a particular sub-culture of labor or leisure, details about the workings of the relevant job, hobby, or activity.

  Anything you had to research, or make up as if it was research on something imaginary, becomes exposition when you write it into your actual text. So do the past biographies and interactions of your cast of characters.

  Some readers find information conveyed through fiction enjoyable in its own right, expanding their knowledge of a particular subject matter in an accessible way. An affinity for certain topic, whether it’s the capabilities of a new navy helicopter or the rules of magic in a fantasy world, may lead readers to want to interact with it vicariously through your work. Beware the temptation to
satisfy this small segment of the audience by providing unnecessary exposition.

  Too much information breaks the fictional illusion, leads the reader away from your core question, and brings your pacing to a halt.

  Too little and the audience becomes confused, losing track of the literal action you’re describing, missing the key motivations that signal the outcomes they should hope for or fear in a given sequence. When you include story moments that depend on surprise for their impact, also take care that readers neither see where you’re headed long before you get there, or are so blindsided by a revelation that it violates their trust in the story you’re telling.

  Pipe

  Pipe beats establish facts that come to matter later in the narrative. The term originates in screenwriting jargon, comparing the info viewers need to react as desired to the story to the plumbing under the walls and floors of a house. Sometimes you’ll deliver Pipe beats directly. In the early going, you can rely on a certain tolerance for directly provided information—viewers want to leap into the story you’re telling and will accept the grounding you provide in order to accomplish that.

  The detective’s client hires her to find his missing husband, providing basic facts about him, including what he was doing when he was last seen.

  The forbidding housekeeper explains to the newly arrived governess the peculiar rules of the master’s household.

  The narrator recounts the history of the Phan family, and how they came to enter the taxidermy business.

  As you get deeper into the narrative, reader tolerance for beats that obviously stop the action in order to dump more information on the protagonist and audience steeply declines. For this reason, whenever possible, the adroit writer slips information into a dramatic scene whose outcome readers have been given other reasons to care about. Or, conversely, finds a way to charge it with emotion by invoking fear or hope. When in doubt, make the focus character earn the information by overcoming a dramatic or procedural obstacle. This plays as an up beat, energizing with emotion a moment that otherwise would play as a flat, obvious placement of your story’s mechanical elements.

  The detective tricks her quarry’s shady business partner into telling her about his secret cabin in the mountains.

  The governess discovers a painting of her employer’s wife, which he has hidden away, and sees that she and the portrait share a striking resemblance.

  A young woman argues with her mother, who blurts out a family secret—she isn’t their biological daughter.

  Question

  This beat introduces a question readers want to know the answer to. It almost always registers as a down beat: wanting information and not getting it introduces anxiety, an itch we want the story to hurry up and scratch.

  The sailors spot an unknown ship drifting on the horizon.

  Fingers crossed, Fatima sends off her scholarship application.

  A well-dressed man in the bar promises Ryan the solution to all of his money problems, if he goes to a particular address tomorrow at 10 a.m. sharp.

  Reveal

  A Reveal beat provides new information, usually answering a previously established Question beat.

  After rowing over to the mysterious ship, the sailors find it abandoned.

  Fatima’s stepfather throws a rejection letter for her scholarship in her face.

  Ryan shows up at the address to discover that it’s a medical lab in a dodgy neighborhood.

  In some cases the information may appear as a complete surprise, as the reponse to a question you have not primed the reader to want to see answered. The occasional left-field Reveal can exert a powerful effect, and particularly suits a theme of chance, entropy, or chaos. Too many left-field Reveals make your plotting come off as arbitrary, contrived, and/or sloppy.

  Information only counts as a Reveal if it pertains in some way to your core question.

  Flourish Beats

  Along with the all-important foundation beats and indispensable information beats, you may occasionally resort to flourish beats, which relate to theme or mood without moving the story forward. Which is why you only occasionally resort to them.

  Commentary

  Commentary beats occur when you, either as narrator or through the voice of a character, pause to directly offer your abstract thoughts on some matter of interest to you. These may relate directly to the theme, or serve as observational tangents. Commentary beats used to be much more common in literature than they are today. Shakespeare indulges himself with a string of theatrical in-jokes when the players arrive at Elsinore and Hamlet decides to give them acting tips.

  Nineteenth century writers considered it as essential to reader expectations to dispense proverbs, pearls of wisdom, and social observations while recounting the setbacks and advances of their central characters.

  Dickens supplies an emblematic example in the observational opening to A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…”

  John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath alternates prose-poem chapters excoriating capitalism with those following the Joad family’s exodus from the Dust Bowl.

  More recently, experimental novelists have used meta-fictional techniques to comment on the nature of narrative itself, for example in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  As they activate the intellectual over the emotional, Commentary beats can prove harder to pull off than others. For more, see Turning Commentary Beats Into Foundation Beats.

  Anticipation

  An anticipation beat gives audience members an emotional upbeat not just for what is happening, but for the future outcome they can see coming. These usually occur in genre pieces, relying on viewers’ familiarity with genre tropes. When Clint Eastwood narrows his eyes after punks have foolishly chosen to mess with him, we know what’s about to happen, because we’ve seen and enjoyed scenes like this before, some of them starring Clint Eastwood. Anticipation beats often promise a long-delayed justice or comeuppance. They may also foreshadow the sorts of jokes that become funnier because you know what’s coming.

  Bruce Banner turns into the Hulk, ready to stomp his tormentors.

  After finding the document the crooked prosecution didn’t want her to see (a Procedural upbeat) the camera zooms in to show her knowing smile, allowing us to savor the legal smackdown to come.

  Discovering her undermining sister in bed with her husband, our heroine marches to the kitchen island to slowly untie the strings binding the box containing the cake she bought for their anniversary.

  Confused by Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck exasperatedly shouts to Elmer Fudd: “You do! You do have to shoot me now!”

  Gratification

  Gratification beats provide the audience with an emotional up moment that does not advance the story. They may allow the protagonists a temporary respite or idyll, or, especially in dramatic forms, simply pause to celebrate the joys of the medium. They might mark instances of comic relief in which antics unrelated to the main action momentarily lighten the mood. The gratification beat might invoke the theme, even if it doesn’t move the story any further toward resolving its core question.

  The homages to Gene Kelly and Esther Williams dance routines in the Coen Brothers’ Hail, Caesar! delightfully evoke classic Hollywood filmmaking, reinforcing the film’s vision of the movies as a greater source of awe than religion, without advancing the central kidnapping plot.

  Immediately after Macbeth tells his wife that he has murdered the king, a comic porter shows up to do a knock-knock routine and make a pee joke.

  Family members celebrate their bond by lip-synching to music while doing the dishes.

  The travelers meet a mystical tramp who sings to them, conveying interesting but non-essential facts about their fantasy world.

  By definition gratuitous, Gratification be
ats must be used sparingly, and be so inherently enjoyable that the viewer doesn’t notice that you’ve hit the pause button on story advancement.

  Bringdown

  The Bringdown beat acts as negative counterpart to the Gratification beat. It introduces an emotional down beat that does not arise from or advance the narrative. For pacing purposes they require much less time than Gratification beats. Bringing gloom is much easier than inspiring joy. Bringdowns require less build than Gratifications to exert their emotional impact. Unrealized threats, which make us nervous in the moment but are not followed up, count as Bringdowns. A threat that later materializes instead functions as part of the plot proper, and is thus a Procedural beat. When we see that something bad has happened but the character doesn’t, it affects our mood but does not alter the story. In dramatic forms a Bringdown beat can be conveyed subliminally, through ominous choices of costume, set design, and score.

  The hero’s sad sack status comes into sharp relief when a passing taxi splashes into a puddle, drenching them.

  Menacing toughs glare at our heroes as they make their way through a dodgy neighborhood.

  In a war-torn region, our characters stumble upon the bodies of the dead.

  Trying to stop Homer from harpooning a shark, Lisa jostles his arm. Though neither of them sees it, the errant harpoon instead kills a seagull.

  Bringdowns might be funny in a grim or rueful way, but they still evoke the dark side of life. In real life as well as in fiction, we tend to remember ambiguous or mixed moments as negative. They confront us with cognitive dissonance, which the brain reacts to with anxiety.