Mapping story beats.
Back in February, I took a weekend to go to TN to visit Dustin and Phil to get some intensive writing done.
One of the tools that Dustin and Phil have introduced me to is the magical 3x5 note card. *Cue “Ooooing and Aaaaahing”
What we do with a stack of 3x5 note cards is to do what Dustin refers to as ‘Beating out a Story’. You write down all the major beats in your book, and organize them. This gives you a ten-thousand foot view of your story and helps you find potential problems and plot holes. These note cards can be as vague or as detailed as you want, but the more detailed they are, the more it helps you when it comes to actually putting your story on paper.
The ten thousand foot view of a Songbird’s Tale while working through the 2nd draft.
Here are some of the resources we use when working on story structure:
“Story: Substance, Structure, Style and Principals of Screenwriting” by Robert McKee
“The Writer’s Journey, Mythic Structure for Writers” by Christopher Vogler
“Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need” by Blake Snyder
All of these books have their strengths and weaknesses. As with any good resource material, take what is helpful to you and discard what is not. Several of these books are focused more on screenwriting, but they can teach you a lot about story structure which is very helpful for any type of story telling. For now, I’m sticking fairly close to the hero’s journey, but these note cards can be shuffled around and not all the story elements have to occur in the exact order laid out by the hero’s journey. In fact, it will likely make your story much more interesting and engaging to shuffle the cards and mix the order up a bit. This will reduce the predictability of your story and surprise your audience.
Our focus over the weekend was to to work on improving the story structure for “A Songbird’s Tale”, which is currently struggling in Act II. In addition, we worked on beating out my next book, (working title “Rogue Paladin”) for practice. I’ll be honest, these concepts seem very simple at first, but I definitely feel like I’m struggling to get the hang of them. Like with any new skill, it’s important to get the reps in to get the hang of it. The weekend was pretty productive though and I think we’ve figured out some good ways to solve the problems in Act II.
I’ve attached some pictures of our process and some sample note cards below.
Till next time, dear readers! Let me know if you have any resources for writing you’ve found helpful in the comments below. <3 Tiff
A word on semantics:
** It should be noted that we use the word “Beat” pretty loosely compared to industry standard. Phil and Dustin tend to follow a lot of the story structure guidance from Robert McKee’s book, as they have both written for screen before, however, these applications translate well to novel writing.
According to Wikipedia “In filmmaking, a beat is a small amount of action resulting in a pause in dialogue.”
According to Robert McKee “the Beat is "the smallest element of structure...(Not to be confused with...an indication...meaning 'short pause')". He defines a Beat as: "an exchange of behavior in action/reaction. Beat by Beat these changing behaviors shape the turning of a scene." Specifically, a scene will contain multiple beats, the clashes in the conflict, which build a scene to eventually turn the values of a character's life, called a "Story Event". He further describes beats as "distinctively different behaviors, . . . clear changes of action/reaction."
When we say ‘story beats’ or talk about ‘beating out a story’ we’re talking about the major action points in the story. I think we generally look at beating out a story as plotting out the main story events. From there you can dig down into individual scenes, which each have beats as well. We’ll dig deeper into this in the future once I really start plotting out Rogue Paladin. I’ll be sure to share that process as I work my way through it.
