How to Use a Beat Sheet to Design a Story. Weaving Stories Together - The Beat Sheet. Chapter 3: Writing the Script Weaving Stories Together - The Beat Sheet A beat is a the smallest unit of story telling.
It is a piece of the story in which something happens. It could be something dramatic: Blues comes home to find Charlie there waiting for her. Or it could be action: Charlie leaves Blues’ house — and is ambushed by Shikari. Both of these examples are also single scenes. Starsky and Hutch chase the bad guys, finally cornering them on a dock. Note that though this is formatted as if it were a single scene, “HIGHWAY / STREET / WATERFRONT” is not a location.
Starsky and Hutch chase the bad guys through crazy traffic until the bad guys bail off the freeway... Starsky and Hutch play dodgeball with cars, driving through an alleyway market, totalling it, as they chase the bad guys, till they end up on the... Our heroes finally corner the bad guys on a dock. Likewise, several beats can take place in the same setting: Seth tells Summer he thinks he did the right thing after all. Beat Sheet/Story Beat – What Are They Talking About? People keep on emailing to ask me what a ‘story beat’ is, and how you put them together into a ‘Beat Sheet’.
‘Beat’ and ‘beat sheets’ are words that people in the industry in the UK use all the time, and the whole concept can be just a little bit slippery. At its heart it’s very simple. A beat means ‘Something That Happens’. A list of these beats, that gives the main events in a story, is called a beat sheet. The confusion comes because, a little like a fractal, a beat can be made up of other, smaller beats. For example.
You could call each of these big story events a beat: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. You’d definitely work at that level of detail when you are sketching out the overall shape of a story. Later on, when you’re happy that that part of your story definitely runs along those lines, you’d break those five down into more detail. Look at beat 4. Let’s break that down, into a component set of possible beats: 1. 2. What is a Story Beat? « RAYE CARR. What is a Story Beat?
Short Answer? A beat is a unit of a scene in a story where there is an exchange between the characters and the action/ reaction/revelation advances the story and shape the turning of that scene. Long Answer? I can only give you my personal understanding based on my experience. And sorry, but I can only do this in the long way. From the viewpoint of a Fiction Writer! Many years ago I was thinking about writing fiction and looked around for a writing class – no luck, but there was a screenwriting class by a bloke called Robert McKee over two days in London on something called Story Structure.
I went in on a Saturday morning and by Sunday teatime my brain would never be the same again. Until that weekend I had no clue that every second of a movie is choreographed on the page to create the precise emotional and visceral response in the viewer sitting in the dark in the cinema. They achieve this through the Structure of the Story. How? Acts broken down into Scenes. Okay. So.