Beating the Story

by Robin D. Laws
 This edition of Beating the Story has been adapted from the print edition for Kindle devices.
For convenience of reference and to make it easier to see the sweep of each entire story, large-format
beat maps of the narratives within are available on the Gameplaywright website at
gameplaywright.net/beatingthestory.
Text © 2017 Robin D. Laws
Beat illustrations © 2010, 2015, 2017 Craig S. Grant
Transition illustrations and book design © 2017 Gameplaywright LLC
Cover design by Will Hindmarch
Book design by Will Hindmarch and Jeff Tidball
Edited by Colleen Riley and Jeff Tidball
Beat and transition icons have been released under a Creative Commons license. For more
information and to download these graphics, visit:
gameplaywright.net/beatingthestory
A team from the software makerspace Northland Creative Wonders has created a web application for
crafting beat maps using these techniques. Try it out for free at:
storybeats.io
The publisher’s thanks to Craig Grant, Steve Hammond, Renee Knipe, John Nephew, and Travis
Winter.
Gameplaywright
www.gameplaywright.net
1791 Holton Street
Falcon Heights, MN 55113
United States of America
First Edition • Text Revision 1.0 (Kindle Version)
This Kindle edition of Beating the Story does not have an ISBN.
 How to Pretend You’ve Read
This Book
Beating the Story provides writers of fiction, whatever your form or genre, a
specific, detailed way of thinking about the inner workings of narrative: a
system we call beat analysis.
As a writer, you can use beat analysis whether you outline carefully in
advance or write exploratory drafts and then substantially revise them over
a series of drafts. It assists you in finding the heart and meaning of your
work, and in maintaining focus on them. On a moment by moment basis,
beat analysis helps you hone your piece’s emotional rhythm to keep your
audience engaged.
As an editor, beat analysis helps you spot a draft’s problem sections and
point your author to solutions.
As a client dealing with writers on work you have commissioned, you can
use the beat system to couch your notes in terms they turn into practical
action.
As a critic or student of literature, you can use beat analysis as a window
into a work you’re examining, illuminating its construction, techniques, and
wider significance.
The system arises from a simple premise:
Stories emotionally compel us by constantly adjusting audience response
toward the positive or negative, shifting us frequently but in an
unpredictable pattern between hope and fear.
Each shift in emotion comprises a beat, a moment in the story that moves
the emotional needle up or down.
Beat analysis identifies nine types of beats, grouping them into three
categories, according to their narrative function.
The two most pervasive beats, the foundation beats, are:

The procedural, in which characters confront an external

obstacle hoping to achieve a practical objective.
The dramatic, in which characters clash in pursuit of emotional
rewards.
 Three information beats provide the context required for the audience to
follow the story and care about the outcomes of its procedural and dramatic
incidents:

The pipe beat, presenting information needed to understand later

moments in the story, usually without signaling itself as such.
The beat that introduces a question the audience wants to see
answered.
The reveal beat, in which that expectation is later satisfied, for
good or ill.

Finally, four flourish beats invite emotional engagement in a tangential

fashion, without themselves moving the story forward:

The commentary beat, where the author pauses to directly

address the work’s themes or ideas.
The anticipation beat, which encourages the audience to expect
an upcoming story turn, awaiting it with pleasure.
The gratification beat, which supplies a positive up note that
does not arise from, or forward, the narrative.
The bringdown, a likewise tangential or disconnected moment
that introduces feelings of dismay, dread, or sadness.

To better understand stories, we map them as sequences of these beats. In

addition to identifying beat types, we look at the emotional resolution of
each beat, using arrows.
We mark a positive resolution with an up arrow and a negative one with a
down arrow.
A neutral resolution (something to generally avoid) earns a lateral arrow.
An ambiguous resolution, provoking a confused mixture of fear and hope,
we mark with a pair of crossed arrows. Moments of internal contradiction
often register as the richest and most memorable moments in a layered
emotional narrative—if used sparingly, to preserve their impact.
Finally, beat mapping highlights transitions between scenes. A new scene
occurs when the action shifts in time, place, or protagonist. Certain
transitions bring the audience along in a seamless manner that preserves or
builds momentum. Others require the writer to reorient the reader before
moving forward. Depending on context, these transitions may disrupt or
heighten the energy of your piece.
Beat analysis tracks the following transition types:

the outgrowth, whose action arises as a direct consequence of

the previous scene
the continuation, which shows the focus character from the
previous scene still pursuing that scene’s goal
the turn, which sticks with the same focus character but shows
that character pursuing another goal
the break, shifting our identification from one character to
another
the viewpoint transition, bringing in a new viewpoint character
for the first time
the rhyme, in which two scenes that would otherwise be
separated by a break achieve a sense of matching harmony
through the use of a common sensory cue
a meanwhile transition, in which the two scenes share the same
timeline but not place or viewpoint character
the flashback, which moves us back to a previous time
its counterpart, the return, in which the present-day storyline
resumes after a temporary shift in time
the flash forward, moving us out of the main timeline of the
story to a moment in its future

Any narrative can be expressed and illuminated using these basic building
blocks.
 Table of Contents
How to Pretend You’ve Read This Book
Foreword
Prologue: Six Essential Tips Established Writers Already Know and
Aspiring Ones Hate to Hear
Conceiving Your Story
The Building Blocks of Narrative
Our First Example
Laying the Groundwork
Mapping Your Story
First Draft
Revision
Editing and Giving Notes
Beat Analysis: “Have a Seat, Shut the Door” (from Mad Men)
Beat Analysis: “Home” (from The X-Files)
Beat Analysis: Sofia Confronts Celie (from The Color Purple)
Now, Over to You
Appendix 1: Inspiration to Premise Worksheet
Appendix 2: Beat Mapping Quick Reference
 Foreword
This book probably needs about 20% more bullshit to be successful.
What I mean is an inordinate number of books about writing prose (or
screenplays, etc.) have some sort of central unifying metaphor about
journeys, or dreams, or emotional adventures into the winding gyre of the
mythic unconscious of the shared fiction spiritual human story
spaaaaaaghhhh bloody hell, stop it.
Most writers do not face the problem of finding inspiration. They have
journals and story notes and notebooks of fevered scrawls of half-formed
characters and half-finished stories.
What most writers need are some tools to help them tell those stories
effectively. Michaelangelo looked at that giant block of marble and saw
David within it, true. That was his personal genius. But he carved away
everything that wasn’t David with an ordinary hammer and chisel, the same
hammer and chisel every other sculptor used and could buy from
Guiseppe’s Hammer & Chiseltorium & Sundries shop a block down from
Michaelangelo’s studio, you know the one, just past the food court.
Every professional writer accumulates tools. You cannot perform your
intangible art—transmitting emotion from person to person—without them.
What Robin does here is offer another valuable tool in that pursuit. He does
it at the scene arc level, which is one of those particular lenses to which
screenwriters are particularly sensitive but many writers in other mediums
are not. He offers valuable insight about how to take your story and tune it,
finesse it, and move the emotional register through different keys until you
find the exact combination to match the feelings you are trying to evoke in
your reader, through pace and tone. He reminds you to maintain intention.
A series of flawlessly executed scenes and intricately wrought characters
strung together like so many pearls do not tell a satisfying story.
Understanding the different kinds of story beats, how they interact with the
audience and each other, that’s one of the most valuable tools you can have
to guide your audience through the story’s emotional journey.
For years I’ve executed a personal, messy version of the technique in this
book when reviewing screenplays on shows I’ve run. Any writer who’s
worked with me has seen my notebooks, filled with arrows and circles and
colored inks. An episode of television, by the time it’s at shooting script,
has gone through a logline pitch, a two-page pitch document, a full-room
story break, an outline of between ten and twenty pages, at least two rough
drafts, and various sets of notes. But for some reason it’s only when I have
the finished script on my desk can I “hear” the pace of the script. The
writers then sit down and do one final pass. We tune, we look at how the
scenes play emotionally, whether they tell satisfying stories within the acts
and in the script as a whole. There have been more times than I can count
where it wasn’t until the shooting script did we realize “Oh, damn, this
scene doesn’t work.”
The scene of course works as a scene, as a transaction between two
characters, of course—we’re professional writers. Any professional writer
can write a perfectly good scene. But it doesn’t work in relation to the
emotional journey of the other scenes in the show. It doesn’t do its job in
the overall arc. It drags the show down too much, as a repeated beat. It’s
weirdly too upbeat. It stalls. Whatever the problem, it’s just wrong. (Note: It
is invariably the writer’s favorite scene.)
The scene needs to be rewritten. How it needs to be rewritten, in what
direction it needs to be rewritten, well, that’s what this book is about. Hell,
you may even be able to figure out the right way to execute the scene way
back in the outline phase with this book, saving yourself and your precious
ego valuable writing time. Robin offers guidance I frankly wish I’d had
over the course of my career and will now steal from ruthlessly. You might
say, “hey, it’s not stealing, it’s in this book,” but the secret is, I’m not going
to credit Robin. I’m totally going to claim these concepts as my own
insights. That’s how good this book is.
Please, don’t tell him. It’s our secret.
Enjoy the book. And remember: page count equals happiness.
—John Rogers
 Prologue: Six Essential Tips
Established Writers Already
Know and Aspiring Ones Hate
to Hear
This book exists to present you, the writer, with a novel set of tools for
honing your work. It addresses itself to both emerging and established
writers.
However, for those of you who are just starting out, or thinking about
starting out, a few basic facts about writing as a craft and a career will do
more for you than anything else in this book.
If they discourage you, that means you were never cut out for this often
frustrating, always effortful vocation in the first place. In that case, this
revelation alone is worth the cost of this book times at least a thousand.
(Established writers, you can skip this bit. It’s the same stuff you say on
panels in response to questions from aspiring writers.)

Sit Your Ass in the Chair and Write

The only way to become a writer is to write. Not to think about writing. Not
to imagine yourself writing. But by taking many hours of your precious life
you could be spending with friends and family to sit by yourself and create
something. Something that will suck. And then keep writing more. Which
will also suck. And keep at it and at it until one day the effort starts to pay
off, and you can maybe, on a good day, when you got enough sleep the
night before and succeed in shutting out the ever-multiplying distractions of
contemporary life, produce something that no longer entirely sucks.
This is true of any creative pursuit, of course, but this book is not about
playing the violin or painting, it’s about writing.
If you haven’t put in the time, all of the beat mapping in the world won’t
make your work worth reading.
Go write.

Ideas are Worthless

You may want to write in order to realize a particular story idea, one you
find not only entrancing but unprecedentedly original.
As such, you may fear that editors, commenters, studios, or publishers
want to steal your idea and use it themselves without compensating you.
No one wants your ideas.
A strong idea does not make a good work.
And your idea is almost certainly not so different from any other.
No great work stands and falls on the brilliant originality of its premise.
Those few that do something that has never before been done also display
matchless execution.
The audience, and the market, value execution, not ideas. The modulation
of emotional beats this book presents is a key part of that execution. So is
style, which this book does not have much to say about.
We refer to novels and screenplays and stories as “works” because that’s
what they require: work.
Your idea is nothing until you turn it into something through work. By
sitting your ass in the chair and writing.

Sit Your Ass in the Chair and Read

If you don’t read obsessively, and widely, you will never write
compellingly. Everything you read, but especially the material you most
admire, goes into the great hopper of your consciousness, to serve as the
raw ingredients of technique you draw upon when composing dialogue,
description, and incident.
Read new works and old. Don’t just read the genre you love best and hope
to work in. Read outside your comfort zone, assimilating as many styles and
voices as you can.
If all you read is J.R.R. Tolkien and David Eddings and Guy Gavriel Kay
and George R.R. Martin, your high fantasy will read as a derivative of a
derivative of a copy of a facsimile.
If instead you read Tolkien and Dashiell Hammett and Jane Austen and
Joan Didion and Italo Calvino and Louise Erdrich, your unique collection of
influences, combined with your life experience, will fuse into a distinctive
blend that is all of your influences and none of them—that is you.

Don’t Just Read Books, Read Life

Most writers are introverts. Extroverts tend to drop out when they reach the
“go sit in a room alone for hours and hours on end” part.
However, even the most dedicated wallflowers among us can get out there
and watch how other people behave. If you only take inspiration from other
writers’ fictional characters, you’ll always be writing life from a remove.
Your characters will take on a cartoonish, stylized quality.
You don’t have to get out there and do as much heroin as William S.
Burroughs, or ruin your body in pursuit of action like Hemingway.
Pay attention to the world around you, and to the people in it. Watch what
they do and listen to what they say. Notice how these two things don’t
always match.
Observers make good supporting characters and lousy protagonists. Keep
a special eye out for the sorts of folks who move their personal stories
forward.
As you run into people who make a mark on the world around them, from
the saints to the shit-disturbers, ask yourself what motivates them. Should
they seem internally conflicted or contradictory, decide what their dramatic
poles (see Poles) might be. After you witness, or take part in, an argument,
sift it in your mind afterwards. Who wanted what? Did they get it? If so,
how? If not, why not? Who was the petitioner and who was the granter?
(See Foundation Beats: Dramatic.) What emotional tactics did they use?
Two sorts of people study others like this: writers and psychopaths. Do me
a favor and promise to use your powers only for good.
But seriously, no matter how distant your chosen genre might be from
your daily life, the underlying verities of human behavior will make the
difference between the generic and the specific, the trope and the real.
Read life.

If You Can See Yourself Doing Anything Else,

Do That Instead
Ask yourself why you want to be a writer.
Is it for the money?
There isn’t any. Not on the scale you’re thinking, anyway. Your favorite
book authors may well be struggling financially. The famous writers you
can think of who got rich at it are the only ones who did.
Who largely perpetuates the myth of the well-paid writer? Writers do,
when writing about fictional writers. These characters are often portrayed as
wealthy, because protagonists with money and no set schedule fit into any
plot line super conveniently. This is funny because you’d think writers
would at least be able to portray their own field accurately. The average
member of the Writers’ Union of Canada, an organization I happen to
belong to, makes around $13,000 per year from writing work. That’s
$13,000 Canadian.
Is it for the validation?
If that’s your primary aim, research the science of happiness and ask
yourself if externally measured success in writing, whatever that is, has
anything to do with that.
Also, make sure you’re the extremely rare sort of person who remembers
triumphant moments of genuine recognition with greater vividness and
satisfaction than thoughtless put-downs from random Internet presences
hovering in the electronic ether.
The writing life is kinder to thick-skinned, stubborn souls who follow
their own compasses than it is for seekers of outside approval.
Is it for the lifestyle?
Lots of folks who haven’t yet written for some reason imagine it as an
easy job, when it is anything but.
Some days the words will flow like pure inspiration from an Arcadian
spring. At least as often you’ll struggle to extract them from a muzzy,
unyielding brain. At the end of the day you may be unable to distinguish the
magically written words from those produced by awful struggle. The more
experience and skill you gain, the harder it may become to satisfy your own
standards.
Writing is less a path to happiness than it is the exercise of a perhaps
unfortunate compulsion.
Like the header says, if you can see yourself doing something else with
your life, do that. Anyone who can be discouraged from a writing career,
should be.

Seriously, Sit Your Ass in the Chair and Write

If after all that you still want to give it a go, the sixth tip is the same as the
first.
Write, and write, and write.
And maybe take a shortcut or two by using the ideas in this book.
 •••

Making This Book Work For You

The practitioner must approach all writing theory with caution. Mine
included.
Any statement about writing requires heavy qualification. Works of
profound and shocking originality become so by breaking the rules. Beating
the Story describes how most successful stories operate, most of the time. If
you see how to write something masterful that ignores all of its precepts, go
to it. You may have the defining work of our era on your hands. Or maybe
both of us are wrong.
A rule of writing tells us that qualifiers weaken prose and should be
avoided. Ergo, please read any statement in this book that you find to be
overly proscriptive as including an invisible “maybe,” “perhaps,” or “except
for the exceptions.”
I have never seen a book of writing advice I agreed with in its entirety.
Especially when it expresses itself with cultic certitude. Defining your
objections to theories of the process may be as valuable to your growth as a
writer as mining them for usable techniques.
To lurch for an obvious metaphor, treat these ideas as tools in a box. Use
the ones that do the job for you. Let the others sink to the bottom with that
weird set of pliers and the leftover IKEA brackets.
Any statement about what works in fiction prompts the question: hey, how
much of this theory is just you generalizing your personal tastes? Although
I have my favored devices and hated bugaboos in current fictional practice
just as you, the reader, do, I have striven to maintain a neutral tone toward
techniques outside of the book’s basic thesis. Despite this effort you may
still be able to read between the lines on such matters as expository
montages, extended nature descriptions, or flash-forwards in teaser
sequences.
An effort to identify the core elements of narrative and render them as
units on a diagram by definition threatens the reader with an experience as
dry as it is daunting. In an effort to leaven the heavy-duty analysis I have
adopted a conversational tone, with maybe a wisecrack or seven. We’re just
writers talking shop here.
This book addresses itself to both emerging and seasoned writers.
Experienced hands will spot sections they can confidently skip. If you’ve
published or produced you don’t need this book to tell you what a foil is, or
how an ensemble drama works.

Style Notes
You may be writing for readers, viewers, or perhaps even listeners. For the
sake of variety, this book uses the following terms interchangeably:

“reader” and “viewer”

“readers,” “viewers,” and “audience”

Unless stated otherwise, treat a sentence about keeping your audience

engaged as applying to any form of narrative media, not just television,
theater, and film. Likewise a reference to readers should be read as applying
beyond the written word.
Many storytelling examples given here come from classic works you will
immediately recognize. Others I made up, to best express the point at hand.
If you don’t recognize an example, don’t knock yourself out trying to figure
out where it’s from.

Does This Sound Eerily Familiar?

The system of story analysis presented here first appeared in my previous
Gameplaywright book, Hamlet’s Hit Points. It applies them to the
collaborative storytelling world of tabletop roleplaying games. If you know
what a d12 is, you might enjoy it, too.
To play a story game based on these principles, check out Hillfolk, also by
me, available from Pelgrane Press.
 1
Conceiving Your Story
As already mentioned, ideas have no value until you execute them. In this
section we’ll examine techniques and analytical tools that can help you take
the elements that inspired your idea and begin to break them out into a
coherent, compelling story.
Authors are often asked where they get their ideas. We usually duck this
common question because the process is both hard to pin down and boring
to talk about. The kernel of an idea can germinate in any number of ways:

a common trope you want to put a new spin on

a conflict between people
a genre conceit you don’t think anyone has done yet
a historical anecdote or situation
a real person’s story you want to use as the basis for a fictional
account
a thesis you want to advance about life, politics, faith, or
philosophy
a visual image that unfolds itself into a story
an assignment to write a piece based on an existing property or
premise
an image or situation from a dream
an issue you are conflicted about and whose contradictions you
wish to explore through fiction
from a character you suddenly envision and become fascinated
with, perhaps unbidden, perhaps from seeing someone on the
street
from a moment in an existing work that sends your thoughts
spinning in another direction
from elements you randomly combine as a creativity exercise
something that happened to you
There are so many ways to conceive ideas that I may well have left yours
off this list. They range from the completely intuitive to the systematic and
mechanical.
If you are reading this without a particular idea in mind, find the
document where you compile all of your ideas and pick one you’d like to
explore.
You don’t keep a file of all of your ideas? You should do that. In today’s
smartphone and Google Docs world, you have less excuse than ever to let
an idea come to you and then fade away into the well of memory.
If you have no premise whatsoever at hand, use the idea springboard in
the insert section below to bring one to mind. Then skip to the next section.

The Random Actor Method: An Idea

Springboard
This random inspiration-triggering method will spark an idea that you can then use to
think through the steps and techniques we’re about to outline.
Fire up your web browser and go to www.imdb.com/random/name. This will
redirect you to the Internet Movie Database page of a randomly selected currently
popular actor.
Return to that URL a second time. You will have to re-enter it, rather than hitting
refresh, as the latter will keep you on the original page.
You may have to do this a number of times before you have two performers you
recognize. One or both might have passed away already, but that’s not a problem.
You’re not literally writing a piece for them and will likely move a long way from their
personae by the time you’re finished.
Next, choose a genre you like and prefer to work in. Character-driven literary fiction
counts as a genre.
Now ask yourself what relationship characters that might be played by those two
performers might have to one another: parent and child, lovers, spouses, mentor and
student, work rivals, sworn enemies, whatever first springs to mind.
Finally, within the range of settings and situations suggested by your chosen genre,
imagine a conflict that might arise between them.
Your result might look something like this:
Rachel McAdams + Anjelica Huston + character-driven fiction: academic marries the
son of her famously reclusive literary idol and attempts to pull her from her spiral of
quiet self-destruction.
Jackie Earle Haley + Tom Cruise + crime drama: hunter becomes hunted when an
inventively murderous hit man escapes from jail and comes after the former
undercover cop who put him away.
 Ron Perlman + James Marsden + science fiction: after a troubling medical diagnosis, a
man seeks out the estranged bioscientist father who, unknown to him, grew him as
an artificial being.
Rebel Wilson + Haley Joel Osment + comedy: brash life coach volunteers to transform
the style and confidence of an introverted tech genius as he struggles to keep his
fast-growing company out of the hands of corporate weasels.
None of these will have agents pounding down your door to look at your latest
pages, but it will give you an example to keep in mind as we run down the techniques
in this book. If you keep doing this, perhaps before bedtime or before going on a
solitary walk, you might every so often hit on something worth jotting down in your
ideas file.
You’ll find many other idea springboarding methods online. If you have one you
prefer, use it instead.

Turning Inspiration Into Premise

Not for the last time in this book, I will now take a broad term used in
writing and define it more specifically for our purposes.
The premise is a set of tightly interrelated elements you need to assemble
before outlining, writing, or editing using the beat analysis system.
Described below, these elements are your:

throughline (see Throughline)

core question (see Core Question)
protagonist(s) (see Protagonist Type)
supporting characters (see Supporting Characters)
thematic opposition (see Thematic Opposition)
genre (see Genre and Expectation)
stance, if relevant (see Stance)

You can tackle these in any order. Codifying one element of your premise
informs later decisions you’ll make about others. Your throughline and
thematic opposition key off of one another, and also affect the way you
define your protagonists. Start with the item on this list you have the
clearest answer to, and then continue filling them, from most to least
certain, until you have completed all of them.
You might jot these all down in the format of your choice, or make use of
the Inspiration to Premise Worksheet in the Appendix.
Throughline
Whether it sticks to straightforward chronology or moves around in time,
any story unfolds as a movement from one state to another. Classic
throughlines include:

innocence to experience
selfishness to altruism
disorder to order
sin to redemption
crisis to disintegration
obscurity to fame
rags to riches
riches to rags
majesty to tragedy
omen to apocalypse
danger to safety
sanity to madness
blindness to sight
crime to vengeance
crime to expiation
bondage to freedom
safely ignorant to destroyed by knowledge
lonely to loved
solitude to belonging
zero to hero
naiveté to wisdom
cynicism to belief
recklessness to responsibility
broken to whole
estrangement to reconciliation
ennui to engagement
 restless boredom to safe boredom

The movement need not occur predictably or at a steady rate. Sometimes

the characters may seem able to resist movement toward a negative end
point, or unable to progress toward a positive end point. With few
exceptions, you want the end state to appear inevitable after the fact, yet
always in question while your readers are experiencing your story.
Your story may use a circular structure in which the character moves from
the status quo to its opposite and back again:

rags to riches to rags

belonging to solitude to belonging
freedom to bondage to freedom

Core Question
Any story that introduces any degree of narrative suspense—which is to
say, nearly any story—can be expressed as a question regarding its
outcome. This is your core question. The viewer’s full understanding of the
core question may change over the course of the story, as you reveal more
about it. The core question evokes the throughline, but unlike the
throughline, is specific to the details of your plot line. Famous core
questions include:

Will Ilsa wind up with Rick, or with Laszlo?

Will Frodo get the ring to Mount Doom?
Will Travis Bickle do something terrible?
Will Hamlet wreak the vengeance his father’s ghost demands?
Will Aminata survive the horrors of slavery?
Will Don Lockwood save his career and still get to be with
Kathy?
Will Anne find life and family at Green Gables?
Which of these soldiers will survive the war they’re about to
enter, and in what state?
 Will Odysseus make it home, and by the time he gets back, will it
still be a home?
Same question, but for Dorothy.
Will Oliver Twist escape his wretchedness?
Will society strike back against Becky Sharp’s excesses?

Some narratives telegraph the outcome, changing the question from what
will happen to how it will happen.

How will we understand Willy Loman’s foreordained doom?

How did Joe Gillis wind up floating in that pool?
How did Holden come to be hospitalized?

Some stories radically shift directions, changing the core question midway
through. When you do this you are choosing to destabilize viewers and
counting on your ability to win them back under wildly altered
circumstances.

The Boil-Down
Now restate your story once again, this time in the form of a single sentence
beginning with the phrase “This is the story of...”
This sentence becomes your boil-down. It mentions your central character
(or ensemble of characters) and either describes or alludes to the theme and
ultimate core question.

This is the story of a man forced to choose between doing the

right thing and being happy.
This is the story of a man who must save the world by resisting
the temptations of power.
This is the story of a man who seeks human connection through
redemptive bloodshed.
This is the story of a contemplative man called upon to perform
an act of vengeance.
This is the story of a woman who asserts selfhood in a world that
 regards her as a commodity.
This is the story of a man who must rethink everything when
history threatens to render him obsolete.
This is a story of an orphan who finds family and belonging.
This is the story of men thrown into war’s dehumanizing meat-
grinder.
This is the story of a man trying to get home.
This is the story of a girl who finds her home boring, until chance
sweeps her into a wondrous world of beauty and danger.
This is the story of an orphan struggling to survive in a world
indifferent to his poverty.
This is the story of a woman who rises through society by
flouting its rules.

Unlike the core question, your boil-down never changes in midstream.

Knowing the boil-down and keeping it firmly in mind helps you preserve
narrative unity. During the outlining and rewriting phases, or when editing
or commenting on pieces written by others, you’ll remind yourself of the
boil-down when trying to decide whether a scene, sequence, or moment
actually fits your narrative, or represents a tangent belonging to some other
story.
S Q
Ensemble narratives in which the contrasting fates of multiple true
protagonists are interwoven typically pose a collective question:

Who will rise, who will fall, and who will keep on going as
before?

Within that overarching question, you can also pose a subsidiary question
for each member of the cast.

Protagonist Type
When you first begin to think about your story, the first few characters you
envision—or perhaps only the first character—are in all probability your
protagonist or protagonists.
Any figure who the viewer wants to see succeed, both because they
empathize with the character and because the character appears early on and
in a large number of scenes, qualifies as the protagonist.
Again, I’m narrowing the definition of the word protagonist for the
purpose of beat analysis. Some writing guides argue, for example, that the
protagonist is the character responsible for the instigating action that sets
the story in motion. This may or may not be what the viewer thinks of as
the main character. For beat analysis what matters is the character’s a)
centrality to the narrative and b) our concern for her success or failure.
On occasion a secondary or even tertiary character can become the focus
of our hopes and fears for the purpose of our scene. We’ll pick up that
observation in “Focus Characters” (see Focus Characters).
Further defining your protagonist requires you to first determine what sort
of story you’re telling.
Is it primarily about confrontations with external obstacles? If so, you are
establishing the main attributes of a procedural hero. See below.
If instead you wish to tell an internal story about emotional interactions
with others, which resolves with a personal transformation (or failure to
achieve personal transformation), you have a dramatic character on your
hands. See Dramatic Characters.

Procedural Heroes
Procedural heroes operate in a world of adventure, peril, or mystery, solving
external problems.
They may well also be serial heroes, who appear on an ongoing, episodic
basis, in a series of novels, TV series, movie franchise, or comic book title.
Examples include Wonder Woman, Jason Bourne, Miss Marple, and Conan
the Barbarian. Any hero capable of bearing reiteration over multiple,
unrelated adventures is almost certainly an iconic hero, described below.
Or they may appear over the course of a single narrative, sometimes a
long and extended one, which ends on a note of conclusive resolution. Here
we’re talking about Harry Potter, Tris from the Divergent series, The Great
Escape’s Cooler King, or Ree Dolly from Winter’s Bone. Meant to support a
single narrative arc, they are transformational heroes, as seen under
Transformational Hero.
Iconic Hero
Built for repetition over an open-ended series of variations, iconic heroes
complete each adventure unchanged—or changed in a superficial way that
does not alter or threaten the character’s core qualities. Instead, they change
the world around them. They encounter a disorder in the world, and using
the abilities and mores that define them, put it right again.

Detectives solve the mystery, leading to the arrest of the

murderer.
Superheroes defeat supervillains in costumed combat.
Special ops types shoots their way through the enemy until none
remain.
Through dogged legwork investigative reporters uncover the
truth.
With unflagging zeal underdog lawyers win justice from the
corrupt and complacent system.

As the last two examples suggest, the disorder the hero sets out to correct
may in fact be a false, corrupt, or decadent order upheld by tyrannical
politicians, crooked cops, unresponsive bureaucrats, behind-the-scenes
vampires, or the like.
Although you can reframe it more specifically to the incidents of your
particular story, the throughline for pretty well any iconic hero story is order
vs. disorder. Rephrasings might include:

good vs. evil

underdog vs. the Man
law vs. lawlessness
crime and punishment
impunity vs. vengeance

I E
Iconic heroes prevail by drawing on their iconic ethos, a core mixture of
practical capacity and philosophical certitude. Each adventure tests both the
inner compass and outward abilities of the iconic hero. The hero reiterates
the ethos—sometimes having to rediscover the ethos after having
repudiated it—and through this reiteration achieves victory.

Sherlock Holmes solves mysteries by piecing seemingly trivial

disparate details into masterful deductive narratives.
Miss Marple does the same by hiding her sharp mind behind a
deceptively sweet demeanor.
With barbaric vitality Conan overturns the false order of corrupt
civilization.
Wonder Woman binds the evildoers of the cruel and violent
patriarchy, provided she takes care to remain unbound herself.
Dana Scully fights conspiracies by cleaving tightly to scientific
skepticism, no matter how bizarre events may seem.
Philip Marlowe goes down mean streets, without himself
becoming mean.

When creating an iconic hero, craft a similar mission statement. Ask

yourself if you can envision multiple plotlines in which the iconic ethos can
be tested, and prove superior to its opposition. Look for something that will
become more satisfying each time you reiterate it.
Your hero’s iconic ethos states or implies something about the sort of
disorder she triumphs over in the course of each installment.
Each time you depict your iconic hero triumphing over disorder using his
iconic ethos, you evoke a sense of mythic recurrence. Your stories become
ritualistic, employing the repetition of familiar structures to tap into a deep
human impulse spanning cultures and eras. If they seem overly familiar or
rote, that’s because the variations you employ lack energy, wit, and skillful
construction. Adept manipulation of emotional rhythm and transition
become key tools in a framework where departure from expectations is not
only unnecessary but actively undesirable.
This brings us to one of two reasons why, in a popular entertainment
landscape dominated as never before by recurring characters, so many
presentations of those characters ignore, to their detriment, the fundamental
energizing power of the iconic character. New situations in which the hero
can reiterate her ethos are harder to write from a technical standpoint than
the simple arcs of the transformational hero.
The other reason is that most writing texts take their principles from
dramatic or literary storytelling, and applying these to recurring pop culture
characters constitutes a category error.
Bending an iconic hero to the rules of transformational or dramatic
protagonists invites two big problems.

You burn your character out. Once your hero has gone from
innocence to experience or selfishness to altruism once, she can’t
keep doing it.
You wind up leaning again and again on the same arcs,
particularly origin stories, or those in which the character tries to
renounce heroism but then must re-embrace it. These have been
so thoroughly mined that they are now less fresh than a well-
wrought mythic reiteration. The speed with which key properties
get rebooted these days only worsens this tendency. It’s a pop
culture version of the tragedy of the commons, but with
radioactive spiders instead of grazing lands.

I H T -U
Some pop culture properties intertwine the stories of multiple iconic heroes.
You most often see this in the superhero genre, which established a tradition
of combining various solo characters into a team book, then later created
teams of heroes from scratch. Here the collective of heroes confronts a
single disorder, all helping to restore order by applying their separate,
sometimes complementary, perhaps sometimes conflicting, iconic ethoses.
The need for each ethos to pay off in some way adds an extremely
challenging level of structural complexity. When writing such a story you
may find it fruitful to use thread mapping (see Thread Mapping), keyed to
each of your iconic heroes, to ensure that all of them build to their
culminating contributions to the taming of disorder.
Not all iconic hero properties with ensemble casts actually feature
multiple iconic heroes. Star Trek and The Lord of the Rings both feature
groups of heroes working together but privilege a key figure above the
others. The other Enterprise crew members serve as supporting characters
and functionaries to Kirk. Likewise the rest of Tolkien’s fellowship
supports, and contrasts with, Frodo.
Single iconic heroes with foils, sidekicks, and supporters are easier to
write than casts of iconic heroes. At the story’s climax they need merely
assist the main hero in enacting her ethos, a moment that is far easier to
realize.
A workaround occurs in media where episodes come out in quick
succession, like television and comics. There you can choose one or two
iconic heroes from the cast to focus on, having them enact their ethos and
solve the problem while the rest of the cast assumes a support role. Then the
next episode’s writer can choose to focus on another ensemble member,
with the script after that moving on to yet another, achieving balance not in
one episode but throughout the course of the season or series. This gives a
rest to both the characters and the actors. In a marked contrast with the
original series, Star Trek: The Next Generation and its successors employed
this setup.
When creating an ensemble from scratch you might therefore want to take
it easy on yourself and choose a central protagonist to bear your story’s
iconic weight.
When assigned to write a preexisting ensemble, start by determining
whether it features several equally balanced iconic heroes, or stars a single
hero with support.

Transformational Hero
The transformational hero overcomes a series of primarily external
obstacles over the course of a single story.
T A
By confronting a series of impediments the hero undergoes a change in state
from one emotional condition to its opposite. When the emotional arc fully
completes itself, the character’s story has concluded.
This is the story arc your editors or producers want to hear about. It is also
your throughline.
Although you could choose any throughline, procedural stories of
transformation draw on a few classics again and again:
 obscurity to greatness
weakness to strength
student to master
innocence to experience
selfishness to altruism
sin to redemption

These bleed into one another; when you go from student to master you very
likely also go from weakness to strength. The first three items in the list all
express, in different ways, the origin story template. The first four fit the
hero’s journey structure famously codified by the mythographer Joseph
Campbell.
The particular way you chose to phrase the two ends of the
transformational arc colors your portrayal of it, and reflects your
throughline, boil-down, and core question.
If you can’t see your hero changing in the course of the story, you are
following the iconic hero pattern, even though you have no plans to
serialize or revisit your protagonist.

When the Transformational Begets the

Iconic
One prevalent structure, the origin structure, muddies the waters between the two
hero types. The story of how an iconic hero became iconic is indeed transformational.
However, at its conclusion, the character’s story doesn’t end. Instead the big finish
sets her up to undergo a series of further adventures.
The transformational nature of the origin story explains its endurance—it allows
you to take a mythically recurrent character and give him the story arc so coveted by
conventional storytelling wisdom.
However, once you wrap up your origin story, you’re back to having an iconic hero
on your hands and are again faced with the issues referred to in the section Iconic
Hero.

T G
The hero completes the transformation by achieving a tactical goal, the full
details of which may reveal themselves through the course of the narrative,
as he overcomes the various impediments to that goal.
 Frodo must destroy the ring.
Civil war veteran Ethan Edwards seeks a niece kidnapped by
Comanche—intending not to save her, but to destroy her.
Francis Wayland Thurston seeks the truth about a strange cult
referred to in the papers of his deceased granduncle.
Buck, a St. Bernard-Scotch Shepherd cross, must learn to survive
in the wilderness after thieves take him from his home.
After blinding an innocent bystander during a triad hit, assassin
Ah Jong promises to do the one last job needed to fund her eye
surgery.
Unlucky ad exec Roger Thornhill flees foreign spies who believe
him to be a rival intelligence agent.
Edmond Dantès escapes to seek vengeance against the man who
had him wrongly imprisoned, in the process becoming Count of
Monte Cristo.

Although the achievement of the tactical goal almost invariably restores

order to the world, the transformational hero does not explicitly regard that
as her task in life.
To achieve the tactical goal, the hero must successfully complete the
transformation laid out in the emotional arc. This needn’t happen at the
climactic moment; it might occur as an early turn, at the two-thirds mark,
incrementally, or anywhere that seems apt to your series of narrative
incidents.
The transformational hero differs from the dramatic protagonist, discussed
below, in a couple of key ways:

To resolve the story the transformational hero must achieve his

tactical goal.
The emotional transformation occurs as a precondition to the
tactical goal, which need not occur at the climax of the story.

Theoretically, you could write a story in which a group of characters

working in tandem all complete story arcs on their way toward the
achievement of a shared tactical goal. I can’t think of an example, though.
More often the transformational hero gains the aid of foils and other
supporting characters.

Dramatic Characters
The stories of dramatic characters unfold chiefly or exclusively through
story moments in which characters engage one another emotionally.

Poles
Dramatic characters either resolve or fail to resolve an internal conflict.
Common conflicts include:

action vs. contemplation

mind vs. body
addiction vs. health
survival vs. self-destruction
oppression vs. liberation
irresponsibility vs. responsibility
rage vs. acceptance
man vs. monster
civilized vs. wild
skepticism vs. faith
isolation vs. community
guilt vs. expiation
open vs. closed
fearful vs. brave
certitude vs. doubt
hope vs. despair
love vs. hate
rage vs. peace
moral vs. amoral
caring vs. cruel
powerful vs. insecure
 oppressed vs. free
victim vs. victimizer
hubris vs. humility
pen vs. sword
swagger vs. self-loathing

Most poles consist of a positive value the audience wants the character to
move toward, and a negative value that threatens to take over the character
entirely. Some pairs of poles might be balanced between contradictory
values, neither of which is clearly all good or all bad.
Note the wide variety in this list, which barely scratches the surface of
dramatic possibility. This reflects drama’s relative freedom from formulaic
pattern. Compared to the procedural, drama traffics less in myth and more
with the psychological and observational.
Although popular narrative favors the arc, in which the character
undergoes a step-by-step progression from one state to another—usually
from a negative state to a positive one—the dramatic character likely
exhibits the messiness of real people. They take one step forward and then
two steps back. Or two steps forward and one step back. They may lack a
clear goal, or pursue a goal without being aware of it.
Your main character’s poles may also be your throughline. If not, they
make a clear connection to your throughline.

Dramatic Resolution
The climax of your story forces your character to once and for all confront
the contradictions of her conflicting poles. This confrontation induces a
powerful and permanent change of situation. The character might:

decisively embrace the positive pole, achieving a happy or

redemptive ending
decisively embrace the negative pole, earning literal or
metaphorical destruction
decisively embrace one of a balanced set of poles, to a positive
result
decisively embrace one of a balanced set of poles, to a
 detrimental result
reach a circular conclusion, remaining forever trapped between
irreconcilable impulses
find a positive balance between competing impulses and
persevere

The first and second instances listed are by far the most common.
Examples of dramatic resolutions include:

After a life spent in pursuit of gangster status, Henry Hill enters

witness protection, becoming a schnook just like everybody else.
After his self-loathing drives him to his deepest pit of despair
yet, Don Draper recovers his swagger, turning a quest for
spiritual enlightenment into an ad campaign for the ages.
Badly beaten, Terry staggers to take his place among the other
dock workers, breaking gangster Johnny Friendly’s hold on the
union and proving himself not a bum but the contender he
always wanted to be.
Ninotchka goes from closed to open when she accepts western
frivolity and the love of the charming Count Leon.
Nora sets aside the submission her husband and society demand
from her to declare her liberation, no matter what the cost might
be.
Othello, his raging warrior side overwhelming the peaceful man
he aspires to be, strangles his wife Desdemona.
Seeking adoptive parents for her unborn child, Juno goes from
innocence to experience.

(As an aside, our present canon includes relatively few narratives in which
the woman acts as the true protagonist, as opposed to providing inspiration
for a man’s transformation. When they do take a central role, women get the
same poles again and again. So if you want to do something fresh and
original, write stories about women with poles other than oppression vs.
liberation, innocence vs. experience, or open vs. closed.)
A -H
Protagonists whose actions we simultaneously deplore and vicariously
enjoy can be considered anti-heroes. Their dramatic poles typically pit a
responsible, socially acceptable value against a dark impulse we
nonetheless find attractive: peace vs. vengeance, dominance vs. empathy,
citizen vs. lawbreaker. Structurally they fit the same mold as any other
dramatic character. The up notes (see Ups and Downs) we get from their
unfettered behavior may be rapidly followed by down notes as we see its
consequences, but rather than breaking the pattern, their heightened internal
contradictions throw it into sharper relief.
E D
Dramatic stories may grant roughly equal weight to a number of characters,
all torn between their own sets of poles. They may be closely linked, as in a
family saga, or appear in disconnected vignettes, which perhaps begin to
converge as the narrative concludes. Uncertainty as to which characters the
narrative privileges over others may remain until the climax. Those whose
poles resolve in the big final scene have clearly been the true protagonists
all along. The others, with poles resolving either before then or in quick
moments during the coda or denouement, have clearly been playing
supporting roles—as are those whose stories fade out without clear
resolution.

Supporting Characters
In addition to the primary protagonist or protagonists of your story, you are
probably already envisioning at least some of its other key figures, who
may aid or impede them as they restore order, pursue their tactical goals, or
move toward emotional resolution. Defining these characters’ roles in the
narrative allows you to refine them and build incidents in which they
feature.

Antagonists
Antagonists stand between:

iconic heroes and the restoration of order

transformational heroes and their tactical goals
 dramatic protagonists and the beneficial resolution of their poles

They divide into three main types: adversaries, alazons, and rivals.
A
Adversaries take a key role in hero stories. They place procedural obstacles
between heroes and their goals. In the climaxes of most hero stories,
success hinges on the hero achieving a decisive defeat over the adversary.
The comeuppance dished out depends largely on genre. The adversary
might be killed, imprisoned, humiliated, impoverished, or subjected to some
other much-desired punishment. In stories aimed at a forgiving audience he
may instead be reformed or redeemed.
Strong adversaries have clear reasons for pursuing courses of action that
place them at loggerheads with the hero. They often pursue a counter-goal,
which the hero attempts to thwart. A simple, readily understandable
counter-goal builds momentum and suspense. A convoluted or opaque one
kills them. You also want to ensure that the plan conforms to an internal
logic; without this, you’ll either throw viewers out of the story as it
progresses, or cause them to downgrade it after the fact. (Hitchcock called
the process of retroactively figuring out that a plot makes no sense
“refrigerator logic.” He argued that this didn’t matter so long as the viewer
stayed engaged during his film. But he said this before the advent of
consumer video, and besides, he was Alfred Hitchcock.) To start with a
strong general goal will suffice; we’ll return to the details of the adversary
plan in the section Adversary Plan.
A transformational hero’s adversary threatens or contradicts the hero’s
identity. The adversary might be portrayed as a sinister alter ego or mirror
image of the hero. The adversary might embody what the hero will become
if the hero makes the wrong choice and fails to complete his transformation.
You can afford to have the two characters mirror one another because you
only need to do it once. A transformational hero doesn’t go through an
open-ended series of adventures featuring a series of different adversaries.

Frodo, who must preserve his innocence from temptation, faces

Sauron, a force of pure evil who is temptation incarnate.
The Bride, who quit the assassination business to embrace life,
must seek vengeance against Bill, who continues to embrace
 death.
Fixer Michael Clayton, utterly poised and unencumbered by
moral qualm, must turn the tables on sweaty functionary Karen
Crowder, who, in her lack of confidence, orders a hit on him
instead of simply trying to buy him off.

The iconic hero may have a privileged adversary who stands out against all
the others, and can therefore follow the sinister alter ego pattern.

Sherlock Holmes uses his advanced intellect to solve crimes.

Professor Moriarty deploys his similar genius to commit them.
Batman uses criminals’ fear of him to defeat them. The Joker
spreads fear and madness for its own nihilistic sake.
The biggest threat to the Next Generation’s Enterprise crew,
embodiments of self-actualizing liberalism, is the Borg, a
dehumanizing cyborg collective.

But for variety’s sake, all of the iconic hero’s many adversaries can’t do
this. So instead each adversary initiates, in a slightly differing way, the
disorder the iconic hero specializes in combating.

The adversaries of a detective commit murders.

The adversaries of a superhero go on costumed crime sprees.
The adversaries of a mighty-thewed barbarian capture ingénues,
consort with demons, and work magic spells.

Adversaries almost always appear in procedural stories, but not always. A

notable example appears in the man vs. nature survival genre, where the
hero battles obstacles supplied by impersonal forces of landscape and
weather.
They generally command one or more underlings or allies to act as
secondary adversaries. The hero must typically overcome them in a series
of intermediate obstacles before tackling the main villain. Sometimes the
writer throws in a twist by swapping the roles of main and secondary
adversary in the late going.
 Adversaries who must be physically overcome sometimes appear as
minor elements in otherwise dramatic works. Casablanca is a drama,
ultimately hinging on whether Rick will embrace altruism and tell Ilsa to go
with Laszlo. There’s still a Nazi officer for him to shoot at the end though.
A
Alazons stand in the way of the reconciliations needed for dramatic
protagonists to resolve their internal conflicts. Where adversaries thwart
heroes, dramatic protagonists confront alazons who insist on thwarting
them. Where the adversary must be defeated and perhaps destroyed, the
alazon must be won over.
In classic storytelling the alazon is the forbidding authority figure, often a
father denying the marriage of the young lovers. At any rate, he may appear
as a blustering, boastful, or domineering figure we want to see deflated.
For beat analysis I’m expanding the definition to any figure of resistance
who must be dealt with by emotional entreaty, as opposed to physical or
external means.

Neither Margot, Richie, nor Chas can free themselves from their
paralyzing hang-ups until they come to terms with their alazon,
their disruptive, narcissistic father Royal Tenenbaum.
To move from oppression to liberation, Ada McGrath must free
herself from her forbidding husband.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Egeus wants Hermia to marry
Demetrius instead of Lysander.

Dramatic narratives can include alazon figures but don’t require them to
generate conflict. The characters can all stand in the way of each other’s
positive resolution.
R
A rival seeks the same goal as the hero, in a zero-sum situation where only
one can succeed. Although the audience roots for rivals to lose, their
transgressions do not inspire loathing or the desire for destruction or
comeuppance. We may see them as sympathetic, but in the way of a
character we care about more.
The unsuitable suitor provides the clearest and most time-honored of
rivals.

As per the above A Midsummer Night’s Dream example,

Demetrius is the father-approved suitor to Hermia, who we want
to see paired with her true love, Lysander.
In His Girl Friday, fast-talking editor Walter Burns (Cary Grant)
fears the loss of top reporter Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) to
Bruce Baldwin, a sweet but slightly dim avatar of midwestern
primness played by Ralph Bellamy. He played similar roles so
often that the stock character of the square romantic rival came to
be known as “the Ralph Bellamy part.”
The irrepressible Susan Vance pursues straight-laced
paleontologist David Huxley, proving herself more exciting than
his apparently better match, dour colleague Alice Swallow.
Iceman not only tries to prove himself a better fighter pilot than
Maverick but also pursues his girlfriend.

Although the archaeologist Belloq also wants the Ark of the Covenant in
Raiders of the Lost Ark, he throws in with murderous Nazis and in this
scheme is more adversary than rival. We don’t want to see him merely
thwarted at the end, but rather are more than happy to see his face melted
off.
C A
Adversaries often appear at the center of a web of allies, henchmen, and
minions who assist them in the execution of their plans. Sometimes the
heroes will overcome obstacles by turning lesser adversaries against the top
dog. In any case, you can usually treat them as extensions and functionaries
of the primary adversary—as procedural obstacles in and of themselves,
basically.
Intricately plotted procedurals—political thrillers, both naturalistic and
science fictional come to mind—may feature true multiple antagonists who
act at cross purposes, putting into action separate plans that place them in
conflict not only with your protagonists but with one another. They may be
overtly villainous adversaries, or, in a grayer moral scheme, rivals to the
protagonists whose goals you portray as both worthy and incompatible with
those of the main characters. To invoke the compromises and
disappointments of real-world politics, you could give equal weight to these
contending forces, granting equal sympathy to all, even though some will
win and some will lose.

Foils
Foils throw light onto your main characters. They allow you to write scenes
illuminating the thoughts and motivations of your protagonists.
S
In procedurals, foils give pragmatic and moral assistance to your primary
hero. Dialogue scenes with sidekicks and companions permit you to
elucidate the hero’s plans, provide exposition, and depict your protagonist’s
emotional state. During action sequences these foils provide abilities
complementary to the main hero.

Pulp hero Doc Savage relies on a team of sidekicks, the Fabulous

Five, for specialized skills ranging from chemistry to the law.
On the television series Arrow, the titular hero is assisted by John
Diggle, who supplies security expertise and gun skills, along
with a steady wisdom the hotheaded iconic hero lacks.
Redemption-seeking warrior Xena goes into battle with her
younger, initially less experienced ally, Gabrielle, who
symbolizes her lost innocence.

C
A companion acts as a viewpoint character through which the audience
relates to an alien, superhuman, or otherwise distant hero.

We see the lofty, sometimes off-putting Sherlock Holmes via the

narrative voice of his loyal friend Dr. Watson. Watson gives
Holmes someone to explain his thinking to. Watson performs
practical tasks with the competence of a military veteran with
combat experience.
Frodo starts The Lord of the Rings as an everyman figure but
during the journey to Mordor undergoes a martyr-like tribulation
 that causes him to recede from the reader. We experience Frodo’s
grueling journey through his friend Sam’s concern for him. By
using Sam as an emotional foil, Tolkien can portray his hero’s
suffering without having him directly complain about it.
The Doctor’s countless companions offset his brilliance and
inhuman perspective, becoming viewer identification figures.

A foil to a hero might both be a sidekick (assisting the hero in overcoming

procedural obstacles) and a companion (serving as an emotional conduit
between reader and hero).
C
In dramatic genres foils can act as contrasting friends and confidants. These
allow you to write low-stakes, relatively upbeat scenes in which the
confidant urges the protagonist toward one of her poles.
Confidant characters appear most forthrightly in the modern romantic
comedy, where often each of the prospective lovers gets advice, whether
sage or misguided, from a friend or relative serving as an advocate for a
character pole.

In When Harry Met Sally, the Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal
characters receive advice from confidant foils played by Carrie
Fisher and Bruno Kirby, respectively.
LeBron James, as himself, appears as a confidant to the Bill
Hader character in Trainwreck.

When supportive parents appear, they take a confidant role.

Though dismayed by Juno’s teen pregnancy, her father (played

by J.K. Simmons) sticks with her, serving as a confidant. As she
moves from innocence to experience, he represents experience.

You might choose to give your character two advisers who push her in
opposed directions. The type specimen of this pattern occurs in the original
Star Trek. Kirk’s ethos has him solving interstellar problems with boldness
and humanity. Spock and McCoy push back against the boldness in
different ways that also oppose one another: logic for Spock and skepticism
for McCoy. McCoy argues for humanity against Spock’s alienness.
P F
Foils need not act as confidants or advisers to the main character. Instead
they may take on different roles in the narrative, crossing paths with the
protagonist lightly if at all. The foil’s story parallels that of a
transformational hero or dramatic character, but with a contrasting or
opposite resolution.
The parallel foil might be a cautionary figure, showing what will happen
if the protagonist fails to move away from her negative pole or complete her
transformational arc.

Mary, a transformational hero, follows an arc from lone wolf to

team leader. She meets and butts heads with another platoon
leader, Lt. Willetts. Later Willetts gets ahead of his men when he
should be sticking by them and gets himself blown up by an IED.
Yasmin’s poles are oppression vs. liberation. Her bubbly, naive
sister Rana encourages her to put up with her misery for the sake
of the family. When her own husband turns abusive, her inner
light dims.
Don’s poles are swagger vs. self-loathing. Formerly nerdy
underling Harry Crane advances to a position of influence in the
firm and adopts an insufferable version of Don’s swagger,
showing how much worse Don would be without his dark
yearning for a better self.

Less often, the parallel foil succeeds where the protagonist fails. This
heightens pathos, provides a redemptive note in an otherwise grim
conclusion, or both.

Hamlet’s poles are action vs. contemplation. When he dies,

Fortinbras, a distant figure who embodies action, takes the throne
and joins his contemplative sidekick Horatio in eulogizing him.
When the moment of contrast occurs earlier on in the narrative, it may spur
the protagonist to do better.

Budding superhero Janey Zap undergoes an arc from zero to

hero. Because she has yet to control her powers, she fails to save
the people in the runaway train. Famed hero Uberwoman shows
up to rescue them and flies off without acknowledging her. Janey
stumbles off in frustrated humiliation.

P
Transformational heroes often meet older, more experienced if not
preternatural figures who aid them in their movement from zero to hero
with a mixture of information, philosophical guidance, and training. Their
ranks include Yoda, Morpheus from The Matrix, the Burgess Meredith
character in Rocky, and Sam Elliott in Roadhouse.
The psychopomp roots itself not merely in narrative tradition but in myth.
Merlin is a psychopomp, as is John the Baptist.
F R M
As you build your premise into the incidents that comprise your story,
you’ll find you need other minor characters to make certain scenes or plot
points work. You can create them and lend them the illusion of depth while
outlining.
In a story where you wish to portray a community or other social world, a
group might function as a chorus commenting on the action, as a measure of
the hero’s success, or as the stakes of the contest between her order and the
adversary’s disorder. You might detail individuals within the group in
advance, rough them out before the outline stage, or invent them as you
need them. This convention has fallen out of favor, and like many older
techniques can lure you into corniness if you’re not extra vigilant against
clichéd portrayals. If you look at older pieces that do use it, they often paint
the characters as broad comic types—rude mechanicals in Shakespearean
parlance—while at the same time making them objects of Marxist
sentimentality. The unexamined condescension of this juxtaposition may
explain why you don’t see it much any more. Well, that and the general die-
off of old-school Marxism.
F N
Some stories present the actions of a protagonist through the viewpoint of
an observer character—a sidekick, companion, or confidant who describes
the action. You may choose to do this either because:

your protagonist won’t survive the story and can’t, in a realistic

narrative, continue to describe it to the end
or it would be out of character for the protagonist to tell the story,
or communicate in a sufficiently literate voice

Both reasons apply to The Great Gatsby, told by fiction’s most notable
observer, Nick Carraway. Were Hamlet a novel instead of a play, it might be
told in the first person by Horatio.
Perhaps due to an increased belief in individual agency in the western
world, this device is not as frequently resorted to as it once was. Current
fashion favors the direct over the distanced.
One issue to beware of is the protagonist who behaves like an observer,
watching events swirl around him without constantly driving them by
pursuing a strong, apparent goal. If your main character spends a lot of time
watching other people do things, they are your real protagonists, and your
putative hero likely one of their foils.

Fleshing Out Underwritten Characters

Heavily featured characters who never rise above foil status drain your
story of emotional investment. Elevate them to protagonist status by giving
them:

dramatic poles (dramatic character)

a transformational arc (transformative hero story)
or an iconic ethos (iconic hero story)

Male writers, particularly but not exclusively young ones, can profit by
asking themselves if they have conceived female leads as protagonists, or
mere foils. If they exist merely to bring about a change in the male lead, or,
worse, give him advice that doesn’t change him, or worse still, serve as a
reward for the hero’s pursuit of his goal, the character will come across as
underwritten. Fix this by giving them the relevant missing ingredient from
the bullet points above: have women resolving internal conflicts,
undergoing transformations as they achieve procedural goals, or bringing
order back to a disordered world by imposing their elemental selfhood onto
it.
Perhaps because we take it for granted that men possess agency and
autonomy, far fewer underwritten male characters appear in narratives
written or driven by women. One might argue that women should get to
write men as barely limned foils for the next half-century or so in order to
even out the balance sheet. But if your story as outlined does have that rarer
problem, it too will become richer if you elevate a frequently occurring foil
to full protagonist status.

Transformational Supporting Characters

Relatively minor characters can undergo dramatic arcs.
This can add a sense of dimensionality to your fictional world, suggesting
that even the minor figures who populate its fringes lead full, complicated
lives. Each is the leading character in her own rich narrative, which you
happen not to be focusing on.

Arcs For Parallel Foils

A minor character’s arc can reverse that of a main character, making that
character a parallel foil.
You sometimes see iconic procedurals in which minor characters undergo
dramatic arcs. Typically a non-recurring character moves from a negative to
a positive state as a consequence of the iconic hero’s order-restoring
actions.

A broken-down former colleague or friend of the protagonist

steps onto the path to recovery.
A scared and isolated kid gains a sense of community.
A criminal goes straight.
A victim learns to fight back.
This pattern lends your conclusion a feeling of conclusive transformation,
without pushing your iconic hero away from her defining ethos.

Thematic Opposition
Your throughline might well serve as the theme for your story.
However, you might have a more complicated thesis you’d like to put
forward, or contradiction you intend to explore. For example, your
throughline might be war vs. peace, but you want to say more about this
than that these two opposite forces exist and put people through changes.
In that case, make a note of it, energizing it by expressing it in the form of
a conflict or a question with at least two possible answers. This becomes
your thematic opposition.
The throughline peace vs. war can be elaborated into any number of more
specific thematic oppositions, a few of which include:

Is there such a thing as a just war, or is it all just war?

Can we celebrate battlefield heroism without celebrating
destruction and violence?
Can war remake us, or just dehumanize us?
Can redemption occur amid war’s evils and terrors?
Can greed steer us away from war, or only toward it?

You will refer to your thematic opposition when determining whether a

scene belongs in your story or could stand to be trimmed. In some cases you
will see that although a moment isn’t working, it does express something
essential about your theme. When that happens, you don’t eliminate the
moment, but find some other way to fix it.

Genre and Expectation

This last item is not a choice per se, but rather a factor that will operate on
you as you make the other choices in this section. If you don’t consciously
address it, your piece will be unconsciously informed by it. This might be a
good thing if you prefer pure instinct over analysis, but if that’s the case you
probably stopped reading this book long before now.
The very first spark of inspiration you had before answering the questions
in this section undoubtedly implies a genre.
If you think you are not writing a genre work, you probably mean to say
you are writing literary fiction. Although it contains more outwardly
disparate sub-genres than commercial fiction, its readers nonetheless fit a
broad social profile and bring to your work a set of expectations for style,
characterization, plotting, mood, and even political leaning. To identify
these, head to your local brick-and-mortar bookstore and look at the cover
images, graphic designs, and back cover copy of its lit-fic titles. You’ll soon
spot the recurring patterns that make up the key lit-fic sub-genres, such as
the serious historical, minimal realist, coming of age, academic satire, the
immigrant experience narrative, to the experimental, the familial reckoning,
and the novel of sociopolitical identity.
Having said that, one of the conceits of literary fiction is that it must
appear to exist outside of mere genre. Among the reader’s expectations is
that the work will not visibly concern itself with reader expectations. This
paradox may best go unexamined. You may well produce more satisfying,
deeply personal work by embracing the conceit and forgetting I ever said
anything.
Still reading this section? You must have identified your genre, perhaps
slicing it down even further to a sub-genre or particular set of works you
wish to tip your hat to.
You may have chosen your genre because either:

you are already heavily invested in it as a reader and creator

or the genre best fits your chosen narrative elements

Your challenge in coming to terms with genre depends on which category

you fall into.

Seeking Variation
Experienced genre hands, you’ll most benefit by stepping back a bit from
your genre, from appreciation to analysis. You know what the audience
expects from a story of this type: to interact with its telltale tropes,
archetypes, situations, and images—and perhaps also to enter into a
dialogue with the classics of the genre’s past. The trick with any set of
audience expectations, especially those associated with genre, is to present
those familiar elements in a refreshingly unfamiliar way. Ask yourself what
angle you can find on your genre to separate your story from others of its
type. With an audience hungry for more of the genre you’re dishing out, the
difference need not be huge.

This is a detective novel, but it’s set in my home city, which few
other crime writers have explored.
This is a horror story in the body snatchers sub-genre, but told
from the point of view of the entirely sympathetic possessing
beings.
This is a war novel, but featuring a protagonist you rarely see in
this genre.

Particularly in tightly defined genres, originality may be more important to

consider than fully achieve. Novelty is fleeting, after all. By the time you
finish your first draft you may discover six other sympathetic body
snatchers stories, one of them written by a Nebula-winning writer in 1958.
But along the way you undoubtedly found a new variation or two.

Seeking a Grounding
If you’re approaching a genre you don’t know all that well, ground yourself
in it before proceeding. Your audience will bring a set of expectations to
your work, wanting you to play with at least some of the genre’s established
storehouse of tropes, archetypes, situations, and images. Read or watch
some of the genre’s classics and also its most noteworthy, popular, or
discussed recent examples. Many people read only one genre, but do so
exhaustively. Particularly on the page, that means their reading experience
encompasses only the range of prose styles typical to that section of the
bookstore. Buy me a drink sometime and I’ll tell you what happens when
you apply the present tense, absolutely widespread in literary fiction, to a
fantasy novel.
Coming at the genre from the outside, your take on it might already add a
new and distinctive element to the mix. If so, you’re good to go.
However, it’s also possible that, through independent creative evolution,
you’ll hit upon the very oldest tricks and tropes this unfamiliar genre has to
offer. This happens surprisingly often when talented writers branch out into
genres they have not previously written in. When this occurs, the same
question as above lies before you: what new angle can you find to adjust
your story for novelty?

Stance
Stories adopt various perspectives on their chosen genres. Let’s call these
choices stances.
V
The Validatory stance finds the writer simply telling a story to meet genre
expectations in a surprising way, without commenting on it or bending it
out of shape. This is the default choice. If this whole section seems beside
the point to you, you’re almost certainly writing in Validatory mode and
don’t particularly need to make a note of it.
R
When recreating, evoking, or nodding to the style or particulars of older or
classic pieces in this genre, you’re working in the Revivalist mode. It
expects the reader to identify your references, responding to the work both
on its own emotional terms and as part of an implicit intellectual dialogue
with the genre’s history.
C
The Comedic stance takes a serious genre and makes it funny. You may also
introduce core tropes of the comedy form, for example a conclusion that
ends in a union of opposites—often literally a wedding.
P
The Parodic stance combines the Comedic with the Revivalist. You intend
the piece to be funny, but much of the comedy arises not from the
interactions of the characters but from your exaggerated spoof of past
entries in your genre.
(Should you wish to impress your lit professor, a parody designed to show
the writer’s disdain for the genre is correctly termed a travesty. Mel Brooks’
Young Frankenstein is a parody of horror films, but his later film Spaceballs
is a travesty of space opera flicks. Discuss.)
S
The Satirical stance uses black comedy to present scathing political or
social critique. Its distance from the subject matter, and sometimes its lack
of empathy, can make it difficult to generate the emotional up notes
discussed under Ups and Downs. Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove pulls off the
remarkable feat of generating the suspense associated with its techno-
thriller genre, even as its bitter satire treats its characters as the broadest of
cartoons. We shouldn’t care about them, but we do—perhaps more than the
people in most Kubrick movies, come to think of it.
R
Though serious in tone, a Revisionist piece seeks to critique or undermine
the assumptions of the genre. Robert Altman’s adaptation of The Long
Goodbye modernizes Raymond Chandler’s noir world in order to portray
his white knight nobility as a ridiculous sham. Little Big Man treats the
Indian wars sub-genre of the Western, and America’s myth of itself, as a
con job. Revisionism had its heyday in the disillusioned ‘70s, but could
stage a comeback whenever the stories we love congeal into propagandistic
justifications of a sclerotic social order.
M -
Here your story acts as a comment on the genre and narrative, calling upon
the reader not only to spot the references but remain aware of the process of
engaging with fiction. Exercises in meta-fiction range from Milan
Kundera’s literary novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being to the episode
of Supernatural where the monster-hunting heroes encounter a high school
drama group staging a musical about them.
 2
The Building Blocks of
Narrative
The beat system considers three elements to be the basic units from which
stories are constructed:

up and down notes, which when viewed together comprise your

story’s emotional rhythm
beats, the story moments whose outcomes give rise to the up and
down notes
transitions, the connections between scenes

Emotional Rhythm
Stories affect us by generating a vicarious connection with their characters.
Readers empathize with your fictional creations and follow your narrative
to find out what happens to them.
Particularly compelling stories not only excite our emotions, but do so in
an unpredictable, varying way.
A story in which the hero overcomes every obstacle, or gets what she
wants from people whenever she seeks it, quickly loses interest and
suspense. In fact, the thought of such a story rings so absurdly that you
probably can’t think of an example, outside the slush piles in which the
works of very green or completely unpublishable writers languish.
You may be able to think of novels and movies in which the hero fails
without relent and is constantly rebuffed when seeking emotional
connection. This structure accurately portrays the struggle with clinical
depression from the inside. Although perhaps instructive, the film and
literature of unrelenting nihilism provides a poor model for gripping
narrative.
Extremely cerebral experimental meta-fiction likewise offers an exception
that tests the rule.
 Nonetheless, the rule is this: compelling stories keep our attention by
moving readers between two polar emotional states: hope and fear.

Hope and Fear

Any fictional situation we as audience members identify with at all hangs
between hope and fear. Any story moment, here called a beat, holds us in
suspense between two possible outcomes: one we want to see happen, and
another we don’t.
A girl teeters on a tight rope.

We hope she makes it to the other side.

We fear that she won’t.

A man yearns for love.

We hope he finds the partner he seeks.

We fear that he’ll wind up alone.

A woman seeks independence from her prattling chauvinist of a husband.

We hope she’ll escape from him into a happier situation.

We fear that the social constraints of Victorian Sweden will
leave her trapped in an unhappy life.

An activist tries to bring murderous government officials to justice.

We hope to see them brought to trial, tried, and convicted.

We fear that they’ll get away with their crimes.

A courtier tricks a general into thinking his wife has cheated on him.

We hope the general figures it out and restrains his jealousy.

We fear that he’ll kill her.

Although few of us have to worry about the insecurities of Moorish

generals, we react to situations in our own life with the same paired
impulses toward hope and fear.
That’s the connection that makes storytelling a universal part of the
human experience, one that crosses gulfs of culture and time.
We don’t just want to know what happens next. We’re rooting for an
outcome.
Sometimes the storyteller gives it to us, sometimes not. Along the way we
oscillate between nervousness and confidence, anxiety and relaxation,
despair to joy, cortisol to dopamine.

Ups and Downs

When a moment in a story increases our fear, we can mark that in our
analysis of the story as a down beat:

When it moves us toward hope, we mark it as an up beat:

Finding fresh, innovative, and surprising ways to register up and down

beats is the essence of narrative.
Sometimes we secretly—or, if you read the Internet comments, maybe not
so secretly—want the reassuring pleasures of familiar tropes and patterns.
We need an unpredictable rhythm of ups and downs for that, too.
In fact, if you manage the interplay of ups and downs well enough, the
familiar becomes the fresh, an interaction with the eternal myths and
verities underlying the storytelling impulse.
Or maybe you just need to bang out another episode of that thing you
can’t even see anymore before tomorrow morning. This works for that, too.

Laterals
Very rarely, you’ll include a key story moment that doesn’t particularly
engage the audience’s hopes or fears one way or the other, but that needs to
be there for some other reason. In this unusual instance, you’ll mark it on
your story map with a lateral arrow:

If you find yourself including more than a few laterals in your story map,
one of two situations might pertain:

You’re doing something experimental in a way this book can’t

help you with.
You’ve included a lot of dull moments that need punching up.

Crossed Arrows
Infinitely more interesting than the lateral arrow is the crossed arrow,
marking an outcome with a mixed or ambiguous outcome. This marks a
situation where you intend for the reader to be pulled in two ways. Often
this occurs when the viewer’s rooting interest diverges from the character’s
desires.
Catherine loves the caddish Morris Townsend. She pleads with him to
stay with her and wins him back, at least for the moment. She got what she
wanted, which would normally be an up arrow, since she’s the character we
identify with. But we know in the long run she’d be better off if the
inevitable heartbreak occurred sooner than later, giving her at least a chance
of moving on to a happier existence. So that’s also a down arrow. Up plus
down equals crossed arrows:

Beats
The arrows in beat analysis mark the outcome of any significant story
moment.
 As a writer or editor using the beat analysis system, you get to decide
what “significant” means to you in this context.
A new beat starts when something happens that reorients the audience’s
anticipation of hope and fear. The old beat has been resolved in one way or
another, pulling us deeper into the story.
As you begin to look at stories in beat analysis terms, you’ll get an
intuitive sense for how finely you want to slice things.
You might consider only the most notable turns in your story to be worthy
of beats.
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.
D
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

P
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.
F Y M
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.
P
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.

Q
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.

R
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.
C
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.
A
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!”

G
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 beats 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.
B
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.
Although events arising from the core question contribute more to your
narrative than free-floating Bringdowns, they don’t register as authorial
cheating the way an excess of Gratification beats would.

Focus Characters
Although we are used to thinking of narratives as having either a sole
protagonist or very limited number of key characters, scenes can fluidly and
radically shift perspectives. Viewers may react to these shifts instinctively
without even noting it.
For example, James Bond appears in almost every scene of the first 007
film, Dr. No. But in one quietly remarkable scene, a secondary villain,
Professor Dent, is summoned to appear before the disembodied voice of the
as-yet-unrevealed titular villain. The scene makes us fear for Bond by
establishing his main antagonist as formidable. It does so by putting us in
Professor Dent’s shoes. He fears the man behind the voice, so we do too.
Although ultimately we fear for Bond, for this one scene Dent has become
the character through whom the vicarious emotion is focused—hence the
term focus character.
On a similar note, many crime and horror TV shows start with a cold open
in which a character previously unknown to the viewer introduces the
episode’s main threat, usually by getting murdered. We feel the fear and
menace through that character or characters, making them the focus
characters for that one scene only. As in the Professor Dent example, the
fear we felt for them then transfers to our traditional protagonist, who we
either fear will also fall prey to the threat, or alternately, will fail to solve
the case.
Through vivid portrayal, you may be able to foster empathy for a
character who fleetingly takes focus. This works best in the voyeuristic
medium of film, where acting and camera placement can make us suddenly
relate to the world through sometimes-unwelcome perspectives. Moments
after Janet Leigh’s character, Marion Crane, is murdered in Psycho, we
abruptly shift sympathy to Norman Bates—not in spite of the fact that he’s
engaged in the guilty activity of cleaning up the scene, but because of it.
(Psycho operates as a fascinating case study in bending the rules of
identification, even throwing its first core question out the window when
Marion dies. As you’ll see if you break it down using the beat analysis
system, it gains its unnerving power by repeatedly breaking a movie’s
implicit contract with its audience. Psycho bristles with exceptions that test
the rules laid out in this book.)
For greatest impact, though, you’ll want to ensure that the character’s
actions relate to the core question in a way that readers find evident. This
allows them, by implication, to hope or fear for one or more of your
protagonists.

From Procedural to Dramatic, and Vice Versa

If your story uses both Procedural and Dramatic beats, you can achieve
rhythmic variety, not to mention a sense of unity and coherence, by varying
their appearance in your narrative sequence.
A Dramatic beat or scene might arise from a Procedural one when:

a character suffers a procedural setback and must then deal with

the emotional fallout
or a character achieves a procedural victory and then seeks an
emotional reward

A Procedural beat might arise from an emotional one when a character must
perform an external task after promising to do so:
 when granting a petition made by another character
or when petitioning another character for an emotional reward

Turning Commentary Beats Into Foundation

Beats
Commentary beats shift a work of fiction from the emotional to the
rhetorical. Even the flattest scene of basic plot development in an
unambitious genre outing can maintain reader engagement by invoking our
hopes and fears. When your goals switch to that of the essayist, you’re
calling on the intellect, and can expect to lose attention quickly if the
content of that essay fails to utterly compel from one moment to the next.
This is not to say that narrative should not seek to convey meaning or
establish a thesis. But if you can make the action symbolic of your thematic
intent, the result becomes both more compelling and more likely to
persuade than if you have a character simply declaim your view.
In fiction, having a character explaining the cost of, say, climate change is
much less effective than showing a character struggling with that cost.

Transition Mapping
Ensure strong pacing for your story by mapping the scene transitions that
maintain and build its momentum.

Momentum
Along with the ups and downs of fear and hope, momentum serves as a key
determining factor in engaging your viewers.
In prose forms, momentum keeps your reader from putting your book
down, even when really she needs to get to bed because she has a big day at
work ahead of her but man, if she just reads one more chapter she’ll find
out if Claire gets to the rendezvous with Jamie in time and oh no okay one
more chapter after that and…
In dramatic forms, momentum keeps viewers on the edge of their seats,
stoking excitement and preventing minds from wandering to the various
distractions of the day. It is the secret weapon of well-reviewed, well-
attended crowd-pleasers and blockbusters.
Your main tool for strong momentum is the scene transition.
Scenes and Blocks
Before discussing the connective tissue between scenes, let’s clarify our
particular use of the term “scene.”
For beat analysis purposes, a scene consists of all action occurring
together in one time and/or place.
In this definition, a scene might encompass one beat, several beats, or
many beats.
In the theater, a long string of dramatic exchanges between different sets
of characters may occur on a single set before a blackout indicating a shift
in time, or in which a set change occurs. In modern film and television,
scenes can consist of a single beat.
(The concept of “place” can require stretching when a sequence features
characters interacting or cooperating while physically separated. When
characters in different cities have an argument over the phone, it’s still the
same scene even if one is in a hotel in Milan and the other is walking along
Fifth Avenue in New York. Likewise, you might be cutting between your
cast of heist caper characters as they all perform their parts in the casino
break-in. Both cases still portray one continuous action; the shifts between
one character speaking and the other, or the cutaways between characters,
are micro-shifts that already thread together and maintain their own internal
momentum. As you map transitions, if you ever find yourself wondering,
“Do I really need to count this one?,” you don’t have to count that one.)

Transition Types
Citizen Kane, for all the intricacies of its unreliable narrators, framing
device, and fractured chronology, keeps the viewer hooked through its artful
use of transitions. Your story might not require quite that much attention to
momentum, but considering the power of your transitions can never hurt.
The beat analysis system identifies nine kinds of scene transition:
O
After a shift in time, place, or both, the narrative
develops from a consequence of the immediately
previous scene.
 Previous scene: In the break room, Jesse convinces Mustafa to
tell him the truth—Katya is trying to squeeze him out of the
company.
Following scene: Jesse bursts into Katya’s office to confront her.
Previous scene: The team scales the walls of the castle.
Following scene: The team battles guards on the castle parapet.
Previous scene: Victor recaptures the monster out in the woods.
Following scene: Back in the castle, Victor enters the chamber
where he has chained up the monster.
Previous scene: At his apartment, Jing rejects Sunya’s plea to get
his drinking under control.
Following scene: In a cafe the next day, Yueming tries to console
Sunya without saying, “I told you so.”

Because it continues an overtly obvious story thread from one scene to the
next, the Outgrowth transition builds strong momentum. The first scene sets
up a question: “What will Jesse do with the news?” “Will they get all the
way into the castle?” “What will Victor do with the monster now?” “What
can Sunya do now?”
The shift launches the audience immediately into a scene that promises to
answer that question.
C
A Continuation marks the transition between two scenes
featuring the same focus character in pursuit of the same
goal, even though the action of the second does not
directly result from a new situation established in the
first. Unlike an Outgrowth, each scene makes sense on
its own. The new scene would still make sense if you
cut the previous one.
Scenes at the beginning of a piece establishing a character’s life routines
or status quo often connect through a string of Continuations.
Because you’re placing two scenes with the same elements (character and
goal) next to one another, you’ll typically want to vary something else
between them, such as additional characters, setting, or outcome.
 Previous scene: Alone in the new city, Yumiko goes to the zoo,
where even the animals shun her.
Following scene: Yumiko, still lonely, tries to strike up a
conversation in a cafe.
Previous scene: The morning after a late night of partying, Poppy
says a cheerful goodbye to her more exhausted friend,
demonstrating her irrepressible energy and spirit.
Following scene: Poppy excitedly gathers up materials for a craft
project.
Previous scene: Restless and isolated, Travis seeks direction and
guidance from a respected fellow cabbie.
Following scene: Still looking for something to connect to,
Travis eats the sad breakfast of an isolated loner as he watches a
presidential candidate interviewed on television.

Sometimes a shared goal between scenes is enough to function as a

Continuation, even when pursued by separate characters working in
parallel.

Previous scene: Roger secures the explosives.

Following scene: Antti hacks into the corporation’s security
system.

T
A Turn connects two beats featuring the same viewpoint
character, pursuing clearly different goals.
After the Outgrowth and the Continuation, the Turn is
the third smoothest beat transition. We remain invested
with the same protagonist, but must adjust to a situation
entirely different than the one we were just engaged
with.

Previous scene: Nils cleans up the wreckage at the video store.

Following scene: Nils meets his in-laws for a tense dinner.
 Previous scene: Anya finally convinces Daniela to train her in
polearm fighting.
Following scene: Anya goes for an early morning swim, not
noticing the crocodile hidden on the shore.
Previous scene: Don watches as Bert convinces Roger to join the
effort to free the firm from the impending buyout.
Following scene: Betty tells Don she wants a divorce.

B
A Break transitions not only to another time and/or
place, but either introduces or picks up an entirely
different plot thread.

Previous scene: Dre collapses in exhaustion, as

his obsessive devotion to his training regimen
takes its toll.
Following scene: Williamson intimidates a rival into ceding his
territory.
Previous scene: Marta sells the shareholders on the virtues of her
new security software.
Following scene: Reg falls asleep at the wheel of his pickup
truck and crashes into a stop sign.
Previous scene: Hera rebuffs Zeus’ clumsy advances.
Following scene: Hephaestus completes a new sword, one so
powerful it frightens even him.
Previous scene: Carmen tells Annabelle to stop calling her.
Following scene: A week later, Carmen hears a mysterious
scratching noise coming from the walls.

A Break transition costs you momentum, as you have to reestablish the

viewer’s attention with the new set of circumstances and the hopes and
fears that flow from that. This loss of momentum lessens if you’ve laid the
groundwork for the audience to anticipate the resumption of this other plot
thread.
V
A Viewpoint transition occurs when you shift to a scene
that presents someone as a focus or viewpoint character
for the first time. This needn’t mark the first appearance
of a character, but it is the first time readers experience a
scene from the character’s point of view. This may refer
to the literal point of view of first person narration.
More often it means that our emotional perspective aligns with that of the
character; we fear that the scene will end badly for her and hope that it will
end well.
This special transition beat notes the extra cognitive cost of identifying
with a new character and forgetting for the moment the character we were
already invested in.
Subsequent shifts back to this character’s perspective are marked with
other transitions—often Breaks, Meanwhiles, or Rhymes.

Previous scene: Martha, our protagonist so far, enters a dark

hallway.
Following scene: A new character, Jordan, emerges sleepily from
a laundromat, carrying a basket of damp clothes.
Previous scene: Dr. Ozon swears eternal vengeance on the living.
Following scene: Reporter Camille Ferron, who we have seen
before but has never taken the lead in a scene, approaches her
editor with a zealous look in her eyes.

R
A Rhyme takes a Break transition and smooths it over
with a visual or thematic element that appears at the end
of the outgoing scene and reappears, changed
somewhat, at the top of the incoming scene. This link
creates a harmony that would otherwise not exist, but
does call attention to itself.

Previous scene: A hominid throws a bone into the air.

Following scene: A spaceship, vaguely recalling the shape of the
 bone, travels through space.
Previous scene: A close-up of an eye.
Following scene: A close-up of a planet.
Previous scene: Camera pans up to a taxidermic deer’s head
trophy hanging over the mantle.
Following scene: A live deer nibbles at the underbrush in a lush
forest.

Although particularly suited to visual media, you can also rhyme, albeit
more subtly, in prose scene transitions. For example:
Joe poured himself another shot. “Cops know better than to mess
with me.”
***
Officer Janice Stokes let her squad car cruise to a stop on a gravel
shoulder out by I-98. Damn caffeine headache. She’d given up
coffee because it made her crave cigarettes, and those she
definitely had to quit.
M
A Meanwhile transition shifts place but either happens
simultaneously with, or immediately after, the previous
scene. Its action does not occur as a consequence of the
previous scene—otherwise it would qualify as an
Outgrowth. Still, the connection in time indicates to the
reader a stronger relationship than a Break, implying an
eventual coming-together. Typically you’ll also want an implied connection
between the two scenes, which might simply be an already established
interrelationship between the two characters or situations. One scene might
not stem from the other, but the audience can see that they will soon
converge.
Meanwhile transitions suggest an attention to plotting and suspense that
may not be relevant for a purely character-driven or mood piece.

Previous scene: Jesse confronts Katya over her attempt to

squeeze him out.
Following scene: Meanwhile, a man steals the laptop we
 previously saw Katya leave in her car.
Previous scene: The team battles guards on the castle parapet.
Following scene: Elsewhere in the castle, unaware of the fighting
above, King Friedrich elects to torment the captive prince.
Previous scene: Victor enters the chamber where he has chained
up the monster.
Following scene: In the town square, villagers gather to scold the
burgomaster returning custody of the creature to Victor, who they
distrust.

The strength of this transition in maintaining momentum depends on the

viewer’s ability to predict or envision the eventual intersection between the
two plot threads, and the extent to which the viewer is likely to hope for or
fear that it.
F
A Flashback moves the reader from the story’s present
action to depict a past event. The new scene functions as
a Reveal.

Previous scene: Elsie throws Tanner out of the

house.
Following scene: Elsie remembers when her mother did the same
to her sister.
Previous scene: Femi wins the trust of the old priest.
Following scene: We see what the priest knows of Femi’s
activities during the uprising.
Previous scene: Yaskar ignores Stride’s advice and grasps the
memory crystal.
Following scene: From the POV of a long-dead alien, we see the
invasion that led to the end of this planet’s civilization.

The flashback puts a double whammy on momentum:

 you’re going backward
to an expository scene

Countering the backward movement of the Flashback is the reader’s

investment in the Question the Flashback promises to Reveal.
R
The Return transition concludes a Flashback and brings
it back to the present day. The viewer may be glad to get
back to the present action, experiencing this shift as a
resumption of momentum. Any transition other than a
Return to the time and place of the scene that preceded
the Flashback will confuse the audience and send your
momentum spinning sideways.

Previous scene: Elsie remembers when her mother threw her

sister out of the house.
Following scene: Shaken by the recollection, Elsie rummages
through her closet for her hidden vodka bottle.
Previous scene: We see what the priest knows of Femi’s
activities during the uprising.
Following scene: An embittered Femi, wishing he’d heard none
of this, blames the priest for giving in to his demands.
Previous scene: From the POV of a long-dead alien, we see the
invasion that led to the end of this planet’s civilization.
Following scene: Yaskar jolts from the alien reverie as the ruins
begin to collapse.

F F
The Flash Forward transition moves the viewer ahead,
but nevertheless occurs before the events of your story’s
main action. You usually see this device used in TV, to
give an intense cold open to a story that would
otherwise start slowly. As of this writing one might
argue that this device has been overused. Maybe by the
time you read this book it might have gone away long enough for your
revival of it to seem fresh.
 3
Our First Example
Upcoming chapters, where we get into the nitty-gritty of integrating beat
mapping into your process, will make more sense after looking at a simple
example. So let’s break from process talk to do just that.
After reading this example below, you may prefer to continue on to the
implementation part, or skip ahead to the more in-depth examples presented
later on:

The Mad Men episode “Have a Seat, Shut the Door” is an

example of a primarily dramatic narrative with some procedural
elements.
Another classic television episode, “Home,” from The X-Files, is
mostly procedural with a few Dramatic beats.
In-depth look at a single dramatic scene from Alice Walker’s The
Color Purple.

Beat Analysis: Maupassant’s “The Necklace”

More than a century after his death, French writer Guy de Maupassant
retains a reputation as the master of the short-short story. He acutely
observes both the vagaries and cruelties of human existence, particularly
those arising from the French class system and the random horrors of war.
Maupassant touched off a vogue for punchy narratives with stinging, ironic
endings, inspiring such writers as Ambrose Bierce, Saki, W. W. Jacobs, and
O. Henry.
His spare, unfussy style allows us to look at what he is doing without
cutting through the prose thicket favored by many other writers of the late
19th century. By picking a very short story we can zoom in and define a beat
for each shift in thought, emotion, or purpose. Let’s find them, along with
the emotional rhythms and transitions in one of Maupassant’s most famous
works, “The Necklace.”
•••
She was one of those pretty and charming girls born, as though fate had
blundered over her, into a family of artisans. She had no marriage portion,
no expectations, no means of getting known, understood, loved, and wedded
by a man of wealth and distinction; and she let herself be married off to a
little clerk in the Ministry of Education.

1) Befitting his stripped-down style, Maupassant

begins by introducing his protagonist and core
question.
Our unnamed focus character has suffered a blow
dealt by fate—her lack of class prospects forced her to
accept a disappointing marriage. We’ll later learn her
name: Mathilde Loisel.
By depicting a character unhappily in one state—disappointment—
Maupassant leads us to wonder if she will wind up in another. The core
question this opening poses, then, is: Will Mathilde rise out of her class
disappointment? Expressed in terms of hope and fear, we hope Mathilde
will rise from her disappointment, and fear that she will not.
Having posed this question Maupassant establishes his theme of class
striving, and the first step of his throughline: from aspiration to devastation.
This first beat is purely expository, making it a reveal. It appears at the
beginning of the story, where the reader, wishing to be oriented in the
narrative, happily accepts exposition.
As we have no one else to identify with yet, Mathilde becomes our focus
character, and we feel for her predicament. Her disappointment becomes
ours: this first beat registers as a down beat.
Her tastes were simple[…]

2) In this very tiny beat, consisting of just one clause,

we get a moment of hope: maybe Mathilde has
adjusted to her disappointment after all. Thanks to the
fluidity of the prose voice, we have now shifted into a
sped-up, retrospective, third person version of
Mathilde’s internal monologue, moving from information to her feeling
about that information. So we can consider this a Dramatic beat within an
interior monologue. Mathilde is both petitioner and granter, in an inner
conflict between her dramatic poles, which have already revealed
themselves, 65 words into the story, as striving vs. acceptance. (That’s 65
words in the translated version, of course.)
[…]because she had never been able to afford any other, but she was as
unhappy as though she had married beneath her;[…]

3) But right away we see that her simple tastes in fact

accord her no solace. The first part of the sentence
flirts with acceptance, while the second tears it away.
The distanced interior monologue shows that she is
still at odds with herself. This second Dramatic beat
ends on a down note.
[…]for women have no caste or class, their beauty, grace, and charm
serving them for birth or family, their natural delicacy, their instinctive
elegance, their nimbleness of wit, are their only mark of rank, and put the
slum girl on a level with the highest lady in the land.

4) Another mid-sentence shift takes us out of

Mathilde’s perspective and into authorial pontification
—a classic Commentary beat. Where a 21st century
prose stylist would likely work to bury the social
observation in the action, Maupassant obeys the
convention of the day, which not only accepts but encourages explicit
editorializing. The content of the observation suggests that Mathilde’s sex
leaves her especially prone to strive for a better class position, which mires
her in her disappointment. So this plays as another down beat.
She suffered endlessly, feeling herself born for every delicacy and luxury.
She suffered from the poorness of her house, from its mean walls, worn
chairs, and ugly curtains. All these things, of which other women of her
class would not even have been aware, tormented and insulted her. The
sight of the little Breton girl who came to do the work in her little house
aroused heart-broken regrets and hopeless dreams in her mind. She
imagined silent antechambers, heavy with Oriental tapestries, lit by torches
in lofty bronze sockets, with two tall footmen in knee-breeches sleeping in
large arm-chairs, overcome by the heavy warmth of the stove. She imagined
vast saloons hung with antique silks, exquisite pieces of furniture
supporting priceless ornaments, and small, charming, perfumed rooms,
created just for little parties of intimate friends, men who were famous and
sought after, whose homage roused every other woman’s envious longings.
When she sat down for dinner at the round table covered with a three-
days-old cloth, opposite her husband, who took the cover off the soup-
tureen, exclaiming delightedly: “Aha! Scotch broth! What could be better?”
she imagined delicate meals, gleaming silver, tapestries peopling the walls
with folk of a past age and strange birds in faery forests; she imagined
delicate food served in marvelous dishes, murmured gallantries, listened to
with an inscrutable smile as one trifled with the rosy flesh of trout or wings
of asparagus chicken.
She had no clothes, no jewels, nothing. And these were the only things she
loved; she felt that she was made for them. She had longed so eagerly to
charm, to be desired, to be wildly attractive and sought after.
She had a rich friend, an old school friend whom she refused to visit,
because she suffered so keenly when she returned home. She would weep
whole days, with grief, regret, despair, and misery.

5) This extended beat provides the concrete detail to

further support Mathilde’s state of disappointment.
Another Dramatic down beat.
This ends the first scene. It establishes the
protagonist’s situation without introducing a particular
outcome or consequence. The next features the same
character and dilemma, making this first transition a Continuation.
One evening her husband came home with an exultant air, holding a large
envelope in his hand.
“Here’s something for you,” he said.
Swiftly she tore the paper and drew out a printed card on which were
these words:
“The Minister of Education and Madame Ramponneau request the
pleasure of the company of Monsieur and Madame Loisel at the Ministry on
the evening of Monday, January the 18th.”
6) The introduction of any possibility of action
suggests that Mathilde could have a chance to break
free of her suffering. The invitation gives us hope, and
registers as an up beat.
Instead of being delighted, as her husband hoped, she
flung the invitation petulantly across the table,[…]

7) But then are again whipsawed: the invitation has

worsened her suffering.
[…]murmuring:
“What do you want me to do with this?”
“Why, darling, I thought you’d be pleased. You never
go out, and this is a great occasion. I had tremendous trouble to get it.
Every one wants one; it’s very select, and very few go to the clerks. You’ll
see all the really big people there.”
She looked at him out of furious eyes, and said impatiently: “And what do
you suppose I am to wear at such an affair?”
He had not thought about it; he stammered:
“Why, the dress you go to the theatre in. It looks very nice, to me . . .”
He stopped, stupefied and utterly at a loss when he saw that his wife was
beginning to cry. Two large tears ran slowly down from the corners of her
eyes towards the corners of her mouth.
“What’s the matter with you? What’s the matter with you?” he faltered.
But with a violent effort she overcame her grief and replied in a calm
voice, wiping her wet cheeks:
“Nothing. Only I haven’t a dress and so I can’t go to this party. Give your
invitation to some friend of yours whose wife will be turned out better than I
shall.”
He was heart-broken.

8) This beat comprises our first scene between a

petitioner and a granter. Mathilde’s husband petitions
for her to accept the invitation as a good sign, and to
emotionally reward him for bringing it to her. She
rebuffs the petition, refusing to accept it as anything more than a reminder
of her thwarted aspirations.
M. Loisel might not be our focus character, but we sympathize with him
and wish he had been able to reduce her disappointment. Her rebuff strikes
another down note.
“Look here, Mathilde,” he persisted. “What would be the cost of a suitable
dress, which you could use on other occasions as well, something very
simple?”
She thought for several seconds, reckoning up prices and also wondering
for how large a sum she could ask without bringing upon herself an
immediate refusal and an exclamation of horror from the careful-minded
clerk.
At last she replied with some hesitation:
“I don’t know exactly, but I think I could do it on four hundred francs.”
He grew slightly pale, for this was exactly the amount he had been saving
for a gun, intending to get a little shooting next summer on the plain of
Nanterre with some friends who went lark-shooting there on Sundays.
Nevertheless he said: “Very well. I’ll give you four hundred francs. But try
and get a really nice dress with the money.”

9) M. Loisel introduces a new tactic, trying to console

her with the offer of a new dress. She accepts his offer,
and he succeeds in mollifying her. This moves her
away from disappointment and toward hope of
happiness—as promised by the rich appearance
necessary for her class aspirations. The second beat of this dramatic
exchange reverses the previous one: her husband gets his petition granted,
and it concludes on an up note.
After this, the next scene moves ahead in time, picking back up with the
acquisition of the dress. With a new scene arising directly from the last, we
mark the transition as an Outgrowth.
The day of the party drew near, and Madame Loisel seemed sad, uneasy and
anxious. Her dress was ready, however. One evening her husband said to
her:
“What’s the matter with you? You’ve been very odd for the last three
days.”
 “I’m utterly miserable at not having any jewels, not a single stone, to
wear,” she replied. “I shall look absolutely no one. I would almost rather
not go to the party.”

10) We discover that the dress has not been enough to

prevent Mathilde from sinking further into depression.
Another down note.
“Wear flowers,” he said. “They’re very smart at this
time of the year. For ten francs you could get two or
three gorgeous roses.”
She was not convinced.
“No…there’s nothing so humiliating as looking poor in the middle of a lot
of rich women.”
“How stupid you are!” exclaimed her husband. “Go and see Madame
Forestier and ask her to lend you some jewels. You know her quite well
enough for that.”
She uttered a cry of delight.
“That’s true. I never thought of it.”

11) In this beat Mathilde, apparently unconsciously,

petitions her husband for a solution to her problem. He
provides it by suggesting she borrow jewels from a
friend, moving her from despair to delight—an up
note.
We now cut to the scene in which she borrows the jewels—a direct
outgrowth of this exchange.
Next day she went to see her friend and told her her trouble.
Madame Forestier went to her dressing-table, took up a large box,
brought it to Madame Loisel, opened it, and said:
“Choose, my dear.”
First she saw some bracelets, then a pearl necklace, then a Venetian cross
in gold and gems, of exquisite workmanship. She tried the effect of the
jewels before the mirror, hesitating, unable to make up her mind to leave
them, to give them up. She kept on asking:
“Haven’t you anything else?”
 “Yes. Look for yourself. I don’t know what you would like best.”
Suddenly she discovered, in a black satin case, a superb diamond
necklace; her heart began to beat covetously. Her hands trembled as she
lifted it. She fastened it round her neck, upon her high dress, and remained
in ecstasy at sight of herself.
Then, with hesitation, she asked in anguish:
“Could you lend me this, just this alone?”
“Yes, of course.”
She flung herself on her friend’s breast, embraced her frenziedly, and went
away with her treasure.

12) In this dramatic exchange Mathilde petitions Mme.

Forestier for a physical object that represents the thing
she most wants: greater class status. She starts out
happy and grows even more excited when her friend
grants her what she wants without resistance, for an up
beat. The jewels allow Mathilde to go to the party,
making the upcoming party scene an outgrowth of this one.
The day of the party arrived. Madame Loisel was a success. She was the
prettiest woman present, elegant, graceful, smiling, and quite above herself
with happiness. All the men stared at her, inquired her name, and asked to
be introduced to her. All the Under-Secretaries of State were eager to waltz
with her. The Minister noticed her.
She danced madly, ecstatically, drunk with pleasure, with no thought for
anything, in the triumph of her beauty, in the pride of her success, in a
cloud of happiness made up of this universal homage and admiration, of the
desires she had aroused, of the completeness of a victory so dear to her
feminine heart.

13) In the party scene, the phrase “completeness of a

victory” tell us everything we need to know—this is a
big up beat for our protagonist.
She left about four o’clock in the morning. Since
midnight her husband had been dozing in a deserted
little room, in company with three other men whose wives were having a
good time. He threw over her shoulders the garments he had brought for
them to go home in, modest everyday clothes, whose poverty clashed with
the beauty of the ball-dress. She was conscious of this and was anxious to
hurry away, so that she should not be noticed by the other women putting
on their costly furs.

14) Now the prospect of disappointment looms again:

she risks exposing
herself as poor. This Dramatic scene features not a
conflict with another character, but an inner struggle
between Madame Loisel’s poles of striving vs.
acceptance. The striving side of her personality defeats the accepting side,
plunging our protagonist into anxiety, for another down beat.
Loisel restrained her.
“Wait a little. You’ll catch cold in the open. I’m going to fetch a cab.”
But she did not listen to him and rapidly descended the staircase.

15) Maupassant has established her husband as a voice

of reason. On an instinctive level if nothing else, we
know enough about stories and the mythic patterns
underlying them to worry when a character fails to
heed a warning. This premonition of catastrophe
scores another down note.
When they were out in the street they could not find a cab; they began to
look for one, shouting at the drivers whom they saw passing in the distance.
They walked down towards the Seine, desperate and shivering.

16) In the story’s first purely Procedural beat, the

Loisels attempt with increasing desperation to find a
cab. Their failure increases suspense and heightens our
distress—another down note.
At last they found on the quay one of those old
nightprowling carriages which are only to be seen in Paris after dark, as
though they were ashamed of their shabbiness in the daylight.
 17) When they finally do get a cab, even a shabby one,
we register that as an up note. These two beats present
a procedural obstacle in its most basic form: first the
problem, then the resolution of the problem—in this
case, successful.
This travel sequence moves us to a new place but not
a new time, making the transition an Outgrowth—as a consequence of the
cab ride, the Loisels return to their home.
It brought them to their door in the Rue des Martyrs, and sadly they walked
up to their own apartment. It was the end, for her. As for him, he was
thinking that he must be at the office at ten.

18) This beat shows that a dramatic exchange can

occur in prose even when the two characters do not
speak to one another. If the writer chooses the voice of
an omniscient narrator with permission to tells us what
each character is thinking, they can be seen to
emotionally oppose one another. Here, Mathilde feels
dejected, while her oblivious husband has allowed his thoughts to wander to
the preoccupations of his job. It may be unfair to ask her husband to meet
an unarticulated petition, but that’s what happens here.
She took off the garments in which she had wrapped her shoulders, so as to
see herself in all her glory before the mirror. But suddenly she uttered a cry.
The necklace was no longer round her neck!
“What’s the matter with you?” asked her husband, already half
undressed.
She turned towards him in the utmost distress.
“I…I…I’ve no longer got Madame Forestier’s necklace.…”
He started with astonishment.
“What!…Impossible!”
They searched in the folds of her dress, in the folds of the coat, in the
pockets, everywhere. They could not find it.
 19) In this beat the full scope of the disaster becomes
apparent. It concerns the external obstacle of having
lost the necklace, rather than the unstated conflict
between the Loisels, and thus classifies as a Procedural
beat—pointed down, of course.
“Are you sure that you still had it on when you came away from the ball?”
he asked.
“Yes, I touched it in the hall at the Ministry.”
“But if you had lost it in the street, we should have heard it fall.”
“Yes. Probably we should. Did you take the number of the cab?”
“No. You didn’t notice it, did you?”
“No.”
They stared at one another, dumbfounded.

20) The inevitable panicked recrimination that occurs

when one half of a couple loses an important object
counts as a Dramatic beat. It reinforces the emotional
impact of the previous procedural crisis.
At last Loisel put on his clothes again.
“I’ll go over all the ground we walked,” he said,
“and see if I can’t find it.”
And he went out.

21) Looking for the necklace beats fretting about it, so

this scene offers some hope. But not a particularly
strong one, so we can score this as a crossed emotional
note at best. The beat centers on the practical issue of
recovering the necklace and thus tracks as Procedural.
She remained in her evening clothes, lacking strength to get into bed,
huddled on a chair, without volition or power of thought.

22) This inner monologue dramatic moment shows Mathilde pushed

beyond disappointed to despair verging on catatonia: another down beat.
Her husband returned about seven. He had found nothing.
 23) Loisel’s failure to find the
necklace himself hits the couple
with another Procedural down
beat.
He went to the police station, to
the newspapers, to offer a reward, to the cab
companies, everywhere that a ray of hope impelled him.

24) By redoubling his efforts, Loisel keeps the

prospect of success alive—or at least postpones the
moment of surrender. At any rate, Maupassant invokes
hope directly, meaning that this Procedural beat must
land as at least something of an up note.
She waited all day long, in the same state of bewilderment at this fearful
catastrophe.
Loisel came home at night, his face lined and pale; he had discovered
nothing.

25) The expanded procedural effort has failed, leading

to another down beat.
“You must write to your friend,” he said, “and tell her
that you’ve broken the clasp of her necklace and are
getting it mended. That will give us time to look about
us.”
She wrote at his dictation.

26) Loisel comes up with another new plan, to stall for

time at least. A fresh approach offers at least some
hope, and counts as a Procedural up beat.
The next scene occurs after a gap in time, but shows
the consequence of this scene—another Outgrowth
transition.
By the end of a week they had lost all hope.
Loisel, who had aged five years,[…]
 27) Stalling for time has also led them nowhere.
Another Procedural down beat.
[…]declared:
“We must see about replacing the diamonds.”

28) Although this is another new plan, this is a last

resort that inspires scant hope. Like the Loisels, we
presume that they will be difficult and expensive to
replace. At best this registers as a lateral arrow.
Next day they took the box which had held the
necklace and went to the jewellers whose name was
inside. He consulted his books.
“It was not I who sold this necklace, Madame; I must have merely
supplied the clasp.”

29) Here Maupassant lays pipe for the ironic reveal

that concludes his story. Something is amiss with the
necklace, but in their distress the Loisels do not notice
it. The reader may be distracted by the difficulty of the
task, and accompanying down beat, and likewise fail
to spot the plot point.
Then they went from jeweler to jeweler, searching for another necklace like
the first, consulting their memories, both ill with remorse and anguish of
mind.

30) The procedural failure continues to wear on the

Loisels—another down beat.
In a shop at the Palais-Royal they found a string of
diamonds which seemed to them exactly like the one
they were looking for. It was worth forty thousand
francs. They were allowed to have it for thirty-six
thousand.
 31) Finally, procedural success—they find a suitable
necklace and are able to bargain the price down.
They begged the jeweler not to sell it for three days.
And they arranged matters on the understanding that it
would be taken back for thirty-four thousand francs, if
the first one were found before the end of February.
Loisel possessed eighteen thousand francs left to him by his father. He
intended to borrow the rest.

32) But then Maupassant reveals that the necklace lies

far beyond Loisel’s means. Seeing the price of this
apparent success pivots the meaning and emotional
direction of the previous beat, now giving us a down
arrow.
He did borrow it, getting a thousand from one man, five hundred from
another, five louis here, three louis there.

33) But whew, at least he succeeds in getting the loans

he needs to purchase it. A procedural up beat.
He gave notes of hand, entered into ruinous
agreements, did business with usurers and the whole
tribe of money-lenders. He mortgaged the whole
remaining years of his existence, risked his signature without even knowing
if he could honor it, and, appalled at the agonizing face of the future, at the
black misery about to fall upon him, at the prospect of every possible
physical privation and moral torture, he went to get the new necklace and
put down upon the jeweler’s counter thirty-six thousand francs.

34) But again, in a second consecutive example of an

apparently hopeful up beat undercut by knowledge of
its cost, we see that the loans come at ruinous terms.
Another procedural down beat.
This beat ends the scene. The next scene takes place
as a direct consequence of this one, for an identifying the transition as an
Outgrowth.
When Madame Loisel took back the necklace to Madame Forestier, the
latter said to her in a chilly voice:
“You ought to have brought it back sooner; I might have needed it.”

35) Mathilde gains no reassurance from Madame

Forestier, whose tart words remind her of her
diminished status. Disappointment again wins out over
acceptance, as Mathilde loses her implicit petition for
Mme. Forestier’s understanding. A Dramatic down
beat.
She did not, as her friend had feared, open the case. If she had noticed the
substitution, what would she have thought? What would she have said?
Would she not have taken her for a thief?

36) Worse than the scolding, Mathilde remains in fear

of discovery. Here, with this part of the problem
seeming solved, Maupassant introduces a new threat:
Mme. Forestier might find out that they substituted a
different expensive necklace for hers. For Forestier to
find this out would require external plot developments, so let’s call this one
a Procedural beat.
You might instead argue that as we’re in Mathilde’s internal monologue
we’re still in dramatic territory. Beat classification can be subjective at
times, but deciding one way or the other is rarely crucial.
This scene transitions to the prose equivalent of a montage sequence,
quickly describing an extended period in the life of the Loisels. It does not
directly follow from Mathilde’s fear of discovery but picks up a previous
thread, the cost of the loans required to replace the necklace. Featuring the
same character and throughline, this transition functions as a Continuation.
Madame Loisel came to know the ghastly life of abject poverty. From the
very first she played her part heroically. This fearful debt must be paid off.
She would pay it. The servant was dismissed. They changed their flat; they
took a garret under the roof.
 37) This Dramatic beat traces a change in Mathilde we
might respond to ambiguously. Here, determined to
pay off the debt, she reaches an acceptance of her lot
that previously eluded her. Acceptance, we recall, is
the dramatic pole we want her to embrace. But at the
same time we see the price she’s had to pay to reach
that point. This juxtaposition calls for crossed arrows.
She came to know the heavy work of the house, the hateful duties of the
kitchen. She washed the plates, wearing out her pink nails on the coarse
pottery and the bottoms of pans. She washed the dirty linen, the shirts and
dish-cloths, and hung them out to dry on a string; every morning she took
the dustbin down into the street and carried up the water, stopping on each
landing to get her breath. And, clad like a poor woman, she went to the
fruiterer, to the grocer, to the butcher, a basket on her arm, haggling,
insulted, fighting for every wretched halfpenny of her money.
Every month notes had to be paid off, others renewed, time gained.
Her husband worked in the evenings at putting straight a merchant’s
accounts, and often at night he did copying at twopence-halfpenny a page.
And this life lasted ten years.

38) Maupassant goes on to emphasize the toughness of

the Loisels’ external struggle over the demands with
life without money. Ten years go by in one
hardscrabble Procedural down beat.
At the end of ten years everything was paid off,
everything, the usurer’s charges and the accumulation of superimposed
interest.

39) Finally, the Loisels have freed themselves from the

terrible cost of her fateful mistake. Their crushing
external problem lies behind them, giving us a
procedural up beat.
Madame Loisel looked old now. She had become like
all the other strong, hard, coarse women of poor households. Her hair was
badly done, her skirts were awry, her hands were red. She spoke in a shrill
voice, and the water slopped all over the floor when she scrubbed it.

40) Once more Maupassant follows a victory with a

description of its cost that undercuts our momentary
sense of satisfaction.
In other words, he is tightly varying the emotional
rhythm.
If we read this description as Mathilde’s self-
assessment (appropriate given the following passage) it works as internal
monologue and thus a Dramatic down beat, tempering the Procedural up
beat that went before it.
But sometimes, when her husband was at the office, she sat down by the
window and thought of that evening long ago, of the ball at which she had
been so beautiful and so much admired.

41) In this moment of internal monologue, we see that

glimmers of the old Mathilde remain, happily
remembering the one night she had the status she
craved. She can still aspire in her imagination, if not in
grim reality. This fond memory brings on a dramatic
up beat.
What would have happened if she had never lost those jewels. Who knows?
Who knows? How strange life is, how fickle! How little is needed to ruin or
to save!

42) But the recollection of triumph inevitably leads to

the pain of the downfall that immediately followed it.
A Dramatic down beat.
This shifts to a new dramatic scene, one that happens
not as a result of these musings but by happenstance. It
still features Mathilde, who as far as we can tell has not shifted to a new
goal or desire. That makes this transition a Continuation.
One Sunday, as she had gone for a walk along the Champs-Elysees to
freshen herself after the labors of the week, she caught sight suddenly of a
woman who was taking a child out for a walk. It was Madame Forestier,
still young, still beautiful, still attractive.

43) This moment reinforces Mathilde’s previous

musings on life’s fickleness. She looks old and
haggard, but her wealthy contemporary Madame
Forestier still possesses the youth and beauty Mathilde
once hoped to parlay into greater status. Any
juxtaposition of two characters in which our focus
character comes off for the worse counts as a Dramatic down beat.
Madame Loisel was conscious of some emotion. Should she speak to her?

44) Maupassant introduces a note of dramatic

suspense, inviting us to wonder if Mathilde will
approach Mme. Forestier. We share her fear and
trepidation—a down note.
Yes, certainly. And now that she had paid, she would
tell her all. Why not?
She went up to her.
“Good morning, Jeanne.”

45) Mathilde gathers her courage, preparing herself to

reveal all, which will bring her tale to a resolution. We
are glad for both things, making this a dramatic up
beat.
The other did not recognize her, and was surprised at
being thus familiarly addressed by a poor woman.
“But…Madame…” she stammered. “I don’t know…you must be making a
mistake.”

46) As a reward for her courage, Mathilde receives a

metaphorical slap in the face. She has aged so much
that Mme Forestier doesn’t recognize her—a direct hit
on Mathilde’s once-driving quest for status.
“No…I am Mathilde Loisel.”
 Her friend uttered a cry.
“Oh!…my poor Mathilde, how you have changed!…”

47) Even when she does recognize Mathilde, Mme.

Forestier pities her—a second Dramatic down beat.
“Yes, I’ve had some hard times since I saw you last;
and many sorrows…and all on your account.”

48) Presumably stung by Mme. Forestier’s attitude

toward her, Mathilde gets ahead of her story, blaming
her former friend for her predicament.
As readers we may be pleased to see Mathilde
showing some spine and sticking up for herself, or
fearful that she’s about to ruin things for herself again—or both. That
complexity of response demands crossed arrows.
“On my account!…How was that?”
“You remember the diamond necklace you lent me for the ball at the
Ministry?”
“Yes. Well?”
“Well, I lost it.”
“How could you? Why, you brought it back.”
“I brought you another one just like it. And for the last ten years we have
been paying for it. You realize it wasn’t easy for us; we had no money.…
Well, it’s paid for at last, and I’m glad indeed.”

49) With this revelation Mathilde enjoys a moment of

victory. She has turned the suffering of her poverty into
a mark of superiority over her higher-status friend. She
took the difficult path of virtue, has finally freed
herself from that burden, and now throws it in Mme.
Forestier’s face a bit.
Madame Forestier had halted.
“You say you bought a diamond necklace to replace mine?”
“Yes. You hadn’t noticed it? They were very much alike.”
And she smiled in proud and innocent happiness.
50) Now Maupassant gives the reader a chance to read
the situation faster than our protagonist, to disquieting
effect. Mathilde might be happy, but the writer has
given us the cue to see that we shouldn’t join her in
that. As she revels in her newfound moral status, the
reference to her happiness being innocent—that is,
without knowledge—prompts us to fear the punishment that literature deals
out to the prideful.
Madame Forestier, deeply moved, took her two hands.

51) Madame Forestier’s gesture of conciliation

provides some comfort, and a Dramatic up beat that
softens us up for…
“Oh, my poor Mathilde! But mine was imitation. It was
worth at the very most five hundred francs!…”

52) …the final hammer blow of Maupassantian irony,

and a giant Dramatic down beat. Mathilde’s inner
battle between acceptance and disappointment has
resolved, confronting her with irrevocable, all-
encompassing disappointment: ten years of wretched
grubbing that has robbed her forever of the qualities she hoped to parlay
into a better position. Without her fear of having her true status revealed,
she would never have lost the necklace. Without her prideful insistence on
saving face, she might have confessed to Mme. Forestier and learned its
true value. Mme. Forestier too stands revealed as having faked her way to
status a little bit, but clearly not so obsessively, and not with such disastrous
results.

Trajectory
If we zoom out to look at the trajectory of the entire beat map, we see a
steady downward slope, its descent slowed by a leavening of up beats
throughout.
This is the same pattern we see again and again, whether the story ends on
the triumph expected in contemporary Western pop culture, or the slam of
cruel irony favored by Maupassant and those influenced by him.

Transition Breakdown
When we look at the transitions alone, we see the following:

First, we see very few transitions. Unsurprising for a short story.

Most notably, the majority of the transitions (two-thirds if you want to be
exact about it) are Outgrowths, the transition most associated with strong
momentum. The rest are Continuations—also unsurprising, as the story’s
protagonist, Mathilde, remains the focus character for all but one or two
beats. (The few beats where Loisel takes focus occur within a quick
sequence in which his wife also appears.) Further, these Continuations
bookend the story, with the majority of it consisting of a single flow of
events over time and locale.
The tightness and unity called for by the short story format makes it
relatively easy to stick to Outgrowths and Continuations. And Maupassant
is tighter and more unified than most, which is in part why I chose this story
as our first example.
Longer works featuring more elaborate plotting, multiple plot threads, or
both will prompt you to dig deeper into the list of possible transitions. But
the short story is all about getting in, laying down exactly the number of
beats you need to tell the story, and getting back out again.
 4
Laying the Groundwork
Every writer prepares differently for the first draft. You may find beat
analysis useful before you start, or as an analytical tool to apply after
finishing that draft, or even a later one.
Established writers reading this book almost undoubtedly already know
how much preparation they need before starting, and what precise form that
groundwork takes. Except in the unlikely case that you’re looking to burn
down your method and rebuild it from the bottom up, you’ll want to skim
from here to “Mapping Your Story.”
Emerging writers who have yet to settle on a prep routine may wish to
consider the choices raised in the rest of this section.

Diving Right In
Some writers work by diving right in to the first draft, writing in an
exploratory fashion and then revising extensively. Over many drafts a
finished manuscript emerges, as the writer, perhaps working purely
intuitively, finds themes and throughlines. Entire characters, sections, and
subplots may be added or jettisoned in a multi-year process of discovery,
shaping, and reshaping. The initially instinctive, “organic” process of
writing gradually transitions into the analytical, editorial exercise of tearing
down and rebuilding, perhaps in heavy collaboration with a trusted editor.
For reasons both creative and pragmatic, writers of literary fiction generally
prefer this approach.
Works composed seat-of-the-pants style may defy formula or evoke the
messiness of lived experience.
When working without an outline, likely challenges you’ll want to ready
yourself for include:

Significantly longer writing time, encompassing many more

drafts.
False starts. You may find yourself writing the first twenty pages
of many different projects, only to peter out on them when the
 initial impetus that started you exhausts itself, or the plot leads to
a dead end.
The temptation to leave in sequences that don’t fit your
throughline. You may fight to keep them because they work well
in isolation, you’ve fallen in love with them, or you remember
how hard you sweated to write them in the first place.

Outlining
Writers in commercial genres, which demand shorter works, delivered in
quicker succession, are more likely than literary writers to rely heavily on
outlines and treatments before getting started. Those working for clients,
whether they be television or movie producers, or editors of tie-in fiction, or
fiction devised to fit a tightly defined formulaic model, usually have to
submit outlines before moving to the first draft stage. Their editors will also
expect a warning of any significant deviations from the outline they might
want to make during the writing process.
Potential pitfalls to guard against if you choose the outline method
include:

overly schematic narrative, in which the reader can easily spot

the familiar or over-determined first principles you built out from
finding that a sequence that worked in summary format makes no
sense or is otherwise unsatisfying when fully composed
predictability of effort, where the initial joy of pure creation is
frontloaded into a few weeks of outlining, leaving only small
surprises during the hard slogging months of actual execution

As the author of multiple books and games that break narratives down into
their component parts, you may be unsurprised to discover that I personally
fall into the outliner category for anything longer than a short story. (Even
for short stories I compose a tight outline in my head and know the two or
three key sequences I want to write and why I want to write them.)
If you are tempted by the outline side but fear the predictability-of-effort
problem, I can attest that I have never written from a detailed outline and
not been surprised by better, richer, more textured ways to deliver its beats
during the first draft phase.

Which To Choose?
I would never presume to tell you, emerging writer, what method you
should settle on to drive the rest of your writing life. Every creator finds her
own way of enlivening, understanding, and ultimately bringing to full
fruition that lightning moment of initial inspiration.
But if we met at a conference and you bought me a beer and then maybe
an ultra-premium tequila and then let’s say another round, I’d say:
Do the seat of the pants thing if you’re a literary writer. In any commercial
genre in which time is money, outline.
And if you’re a literary writer, you might still want to outline in the
privacy of your own office. Do you have to mention in interviews that you
own, or got anything out of, this book? No, you do not. Those who demand
of the writer a hermetic, secretive process should get it—even if your
secrets involve diagrams with lots of arrows in them.

Adaptation
Adapting a work from one medium into another is inevitably a process of
analysis and planning. The original piece functions as a full draft, which
you must then understand and reconfigure to the strengths and limitations of
the new medium. After reading and rereading the piece until you become
fully familiar with it, you’ll want to pinpoint its core elements, as already
set out in “Conceiving Your Story”:

throughline
core question
boil-down
theme
protagonist(s)
the protagonist’s type (dramatic or heroic)
if heroic, the subtype (transformational or iconic)
if dramatic, the character’s dramatic poles and the resolution of
those poles
Knowingly or otherwise, the choices you make when defining these
elements lay the foundation for your personal take on the work.
When adapting your own work you have in one way or another answered
these questions, but may find it fruitful to revisit your early notes and/or
outline as a reminder before proceeding.
Adaptations sometimes expand the original work but more often condense
it. As you review the piece again, highlighting the key moments that
absolutely must appear in any respectable adaptation, note how they relate
to the core question and throughline.
Your outline may take the form of a written treatment, or simply a series
of index cards (physical or virtual) naming the key sequences. You might
create a rough outline by cutting and pasting snippets or passages from the
original into a new document. The underlying narrative already exists so
you’re essentially building a pile of reminders to get you from the original
to a new treatment.
When a sequence doesn’t make sense or falls flat shorn of its previous
context, perform a beat analysis on the original and on your rearranged
version. From the comparison you will likely spot the changes to emotional
rhythm, or the missing informational beats, that altered the temperature of
the piece.
If you’re fearing that this process might be reductive, killing a complex
original piece through over-analysis, remember that the full piece, including
the subtleties and ambiguities that drew you to it in the first place, remains
in your mind from your reading and rereading. Right now you’re studying
the piece’s foundations, so you can build a slightly different iteration of it.
Later you’ll layer in those grace notes and paradoxes, on an underpinning
you know will support them. Those crossed arrows will show up soon
enough.
Perhaps more challenging is the task of expanding a story told in a brief or
simple format into a longer one requiring additional elaboration. By
identifying its core elements before you start to build the additional
incidents needed for an expanded narrative, you can ensure that those new
interpolations do not register as mere filler but rather seamlessly express the
defining qualities of the original piece.

Finding Your Structure

Most guides to the fiction writing process focus heavily on structure—the
relative positioning of major breaks and turns within the narrative.
This book, and the beat analysis system in general, remain staunchly
agnostic on the subject of which structure you ought to use for your story—
except to say that you should have one, or understand why you’ve chosen
not to.
Some markets, and the formats associated with them, dictate a very
particular structure. In ad-supported television you will write toward a set
number of act breaks, with or without the flexibility to adjust the lengths of
acts.
Readers of film scripts expect a certain structure, more or less defaulting
to the three-act setup described by Syd Field in his influential guide
Screenplay.
Even more precisely elaborate structures may tell you to show your
screenplay’s protagonist doing something sympathetic before you reach a
given page number.
Certain romance fiction lines likewise very specifically dictate a structure
built around particular story beats the audience demands.
Novels in other genres allow much greater flexibility, letting you choose a
structure that fits the content rather than working toward a reliable
workhorse of a framework. Too obvious a structure may make your prose
piece feel like the treatment for an unproduced screenplay.
Standardized structures wear out over time only to be renewed and
replaced.
Over the course of the sound era, Hollywood films have gone from
snappy to epically extended to experimental to formulaic to sprawling and
decentered and are no doubt already heading somewhere else by the time
you read this. The most remarkable films are often those that appear to
follow no standard structure at all but maintain momentum through some
ineffable sleight of hand. This may in fact be the case: they’re choosing
transition types so deftly that the audience is carried along without the need
for a broader structure to propel them. Alternately, their writers may have
hidden the standard turns and pivots so adeptly that you can’t spot them on
first viewing.
In general, thinking about structure inspires you to contemplate the
following questions, the answers to which will illuminate your outline (if
you use one) or your wave of revisions after completing the first draft (if
you don’t).

Does my story provide variation by confronting its protagonist(s)

with major surprises or changes in direction?
Are those turns spaced far enough apart to let their impact be
felt?
Does my story include long static stretches where nothing much
changes?
Do the big developments of the narrative cluster together, leaving
no space for their emotional impact to register?
Does the story escalate in stakes, suspense and/or emotional
intensity, then move toward a satisfying climax or resolution?

Your chosen genre and specific intentions may trigger other structural
questions. If your aim is to follow a mythic pattern, like Joseph Campbell’s
hero’s journey or a recapitulation of Arthurian legend, you’ll want to check
to see that your story includes all of its classic stages.
When mapping your beats, you may then wish to include a marker or
notation for each of your structural breaks.
To conclude:

This book doesn’t spend much time on structure.

Structure is good.
Except when you really know what you’re doing.
Regardless of the structure you’re using (including no structure),
beat analysis helps you create and/or revise the moments
arranged within its pivot points.

Blocked Desires
Before embarking on a primarily dramatic work, crystallize its energizing
conflicts by preparing notes on the protagonists’ blocked desires.
Emotional conflicts, arising from unmet needs, form the basis of any
dramatic story. The process by which these needs are resolved or proved
definitely irreconcilable constitutes the incident of your narrative. As the
preparatory step to constructing those incidents, create a diagram featuring
your key characters, visually laying out the unmet needs between them.
An emotional conflict consists of two components: the Desire and the
Block.

The Desire is the emotional reward one character seeks from

another.
The Block is the reason why the other character will not meet
that desire.

Let’s pick up one of the ideas we randomly generated back under The
Random Actor Method: an academic marries the son of her famously
reclusive literary idol and attempts to pull her from her spiral of self-
destruction.
To clarify the example, let’s assign names to the characters:

Holly Moss, the academic.

Juliette Reyna, the mother-in-law.
Tom Reyna, the son.

The premise establishes what Holly wants from Juliette—that she return
to her previous self, the renowned author she studies and idolizes. That’s
Holly’s Desire for Juliette.
Why would Juliette resist this? She retreated from writing and the world
because the stress of living up to her past successes made her an emotional
terror to the people around her—particularly Tom. She hopes to reconcile
with her son, which means she has to show that every last vestige of her
previous, ragingly insecure person is gone. That’s Juliette’s Block of
Holly’s Desire.
The two sides of this conflict heavily imply what the remaining Desires
and Blocks will look like. So you continue to flesh them out, sticking with
Holly for the moment.
Her Desire for Tom is that he back her attempt to bring Juliette out of her
shell. His Block for her Desire is that bringing back the old version of
Juliette, who terrified him as a child, is the last thing in the world he wants.
 What does Juliette want from Holly? She wants Holly out of the way so
she can attempt to reconcile with her son. Holly Blocks this because she
wants the famous Juliette back.
You’ve already established that Juliette’s Desire for Tom is reconciliation.
He Blocks this because he wants to avoid her, and to be with Holly.
Tom’s Blocks are now all determined; to find his Desires, just turn them
on their heads.
His Desire for Holly is to show her that she can’t fix his mother. Her
Block: she has decided to do just that—and has persuaded herself that this
will be good for Tom, too.
His Desire for Juliette is to show she no longer has power over him and
then escape. Juliette Blocks this because she wants him back, not gone for
good.
A table format helps you find the fault lines in these six relationships at a
glance. When you decide to outline or write a scene involving two of them,
you can quickly find a petition one might make of the other, and build the
scene out from there.
After a turning point in the narrative you might determine that one or
more of these relationships has moved onto a new stage, with an adjusted
Desire and/or Block. Depending on how useful you find this table as an
ongoing reference, you might fill out a new one, or rely on your memory of
the evolving emotional dynamics to propel you through the draft or outline.
You may decide that certain relationships needn’t give rise to conflict. The
larger your cast, the more you’ll want to avoid overloading your table with
entries. Less fraught relationships give you the foundation for scenes of
respite or alliance, and thus up beats that leaven the intensity of scenes
developing your primary relationship. As long as your central conflict gives
you sufficient grist for scenes, this process has done its job.
Nor must every web of relationships need to evoke heavy feeling. This
structure works regardless of your chosen tone and stance—it could as
easily apply to a comedy or heartwarming family story as the tale of family
dysfunction we’ve just sketched out here.
Laying these tensions in bald point form may cause you to worry that
you’ve devised something obvious or heavy-handed. However, these notes
refer not to what the characters say about their desires, or even what they
understand about them. These notes comprise the basic subtext underlying
the scenes themselves. As you write your scenes, you will layer them with
the outward expressions and emotional tactics we all use to moderate and
conceal our objectives, especially when dealing with people we care about.
Those nuances and telling details will form the text of your dramatic scenes.
(If you write for the stage or screen, the actors and director interpreting
your work will later conduct this analysis in reverse, drilling down through
the surface meanings of your dialogue to find the subtext layered beneath.)
Typically Blocks and Desires will fully reveal themselves only over the
course of your narrative. Record them in the table at their most extreme or
climactic form. Their first clashes occur almost imperceptibly. Only after
repeated, escalating attempts by the petitioning characters to win emotional
victories over the granters do the scenes fully evoke the intentions laid out
in your table. Even then, a writer working in a naturalistic literary vein will
avoid having characters flagrantly quote their motivations at each other.
To return to our example, Holly won’t start her first scene with Juliette by
announcing a desire to rescue her from her presumed despond. She might
never even articulate her real agenda to herself that way. Instead you write
their first scene as a somewhat awkward initial encounter in which each
tries to establish a sense of comfort around the other but doesn’t quite get
there.
In melodrama or soap opera, on the other hand, they might spell it all out,
in keeping with the stylized, on-the-nose declarations typical of those
genres.
This of course is just one way of getting at the nub of your drama. You
may envision it all intuitively without writing anything down, find it by
writing an exploratory draft, or use an alternate notation that works for the
way you think and create.
If you do use this approach but with a larger cast of central characters, you
will find the entries easier to format as cells on a spreadsheet. I know, I
know, that sounds crazily inorganic, what with all the numbers and formulas
that typically go into an Excel sheet. But really it’s just a way to create a
table that can continue indefinitely, a task limited by the page layout of a
word processing program like Word or OpenOffice.

Procedural Preparatory Steps

Procedurals fit together like puzzles. While dramatic pieces can gain from
some advance thought, plot-driven narratives all but demand it. You can
freewheel your way through a procedural: some of the best-selling writers
of past potboilers certainly did. (I’m looking at you, Paul Feval, Dennis
Wheatley, and Edgar Rice Burroughs.) But if you prize momentum and
internal logic, the more clear, advance thought you can devote to a couple
of key points, the better.

Adversary Plan
Plotting a procedural begins with two key steps, the first of which is
determining your adversary’s plan of action.
Audience members must know enough about the villain’s objectives to
feel hope when the heroes’ actions interfere with them, and to fear for the
focus characters when the adversary scores a win.
In a quick sentence fragment, define the practical end the adversary seeks
to achieve:

to capture the One Ring, enabling the final conquest of Middle

Earth
to possess a legendary statuette known as the Maltese Falcon
to recapture the stolen plans for the Death Star
to protect his criminal organization
to crush the spirit of Shanghai by defeating its most prominent
martial arts master
to commit murder and get away with it
to eat as many people as possible
to collect a number of Dalmatians sufficient for the making of a
coat

If you can’t encapsulate the goal like this, you probably have an overly
complicated premise on your hands. Look for a simpler alternative.
One sign of weak procedural plotting (often also a sign of a confused
revision process or the rotating in and out of various screenwriters on the
same script) is an adversary plan that changes course midway through the
narrative. Having the bad guy switch to a new plan leaves viewers feeling
unmoored. Worse, it makes much of the action up to that point retroactively
irrelevant.
The villain’s plan must never be stupid. Stupid plans fail, so we expect the
villain to fail, so we feel no great fear for the hero or for whatever the
villain’s plan threatens.
C Y A ’ M
The adversary’s reason for pursuing the goal may already be implicit. If not,
spell it out. Weak procedural stories all too often feature bad guys who take
action only to make the plot happen, revealing a writing process that either
skipped this step, or lost track of the answer to this key question at some
stage in development.
Your antagonist may be impelled by the same contradictory poles that
drive dramatic characters. Genre writers in panels and workshops will often
advise you to portray adversaries as complex, nuanced figures—perhaps
people pursuing noble objectives in unscrupulous, callous, or violent ways.
On the other hand, terrible people in real life tend to be incomplete beings
driven by an outsized will to power. These flesh-and-blood cartoon
characters, whether they’re wreaking havoc at the PTA meeting or
instigating genocide, do what they do in part because they lack depth, which
requires empathy. We may in fact prefer redeemable, complicated villains in
fiction because we so rarely see them in history.
Make of that what you will.
Whatever your answer to the question of motivation, make sure that your
adversary has one, and that it remains clearly reflected in the antagonist’s
actions as you build him into your story.
S .S
You can show the reader your adversary’s actions in one of two mutually
exclusive ways: through suspense or surprise.
Alfred Hitchcock’s famous distinction between the two uses the example
of a scene in which a bomb is placed on a bus, as in his 1936 film Sabotage.
If we see the bomb placed on the bus, we experience prolonged unease
during the subsequent scenes taking place inside it. If on the other hand we
don’t know about the bomb until it blows up, we experience a sharp shock,
without anticipation.
In suspense mode, certain scenes feature the adversary as focus character.
The audience knows more about the adversary’s plans than the protagonist
does. We see the adversary taking steps toward dire outcomes. This gives us
reason to fear for the protagonist or other sympathetic supporting characters
even in scenes they do not appear in. We know the bomb is on the bus.
Surprise seals us off from the adversary’s s point of view. Instead we
encounter the plan through the perspective of the protagonists working to
unravel it. The audience discovers information only when the heroes do. We
become alarmed when they discover clues pointing to upcoming
catastrophes the adversary plan will lead to if allowed to occur. A staple of
the mystery genre, surprise invites the reader to engage in a puzzle-solving
exercise and attempt to out-guess the lead investigator character. Genre
satisfaction demands that you as author stay one step ahead of readers,
fooling them while nonetheless leaving them feeling that you gave them all
the clues necessary to work out the answer. Because readers figure things
out at different rates, this balance can be tricky to strike. Also difficult:
making the final Reveal as rewarding as the Question was suggestive and
tantalizing. Placing heavy weight on the revelation of a mystery may reduce
the reread or rewatch value of your work, if that matters to you.
Surprise becomes your only choice when you restrict yourself to the
subjective viewpoint of a single lead character, a simplicity you may find
constraining, liberating, or both.
Some narratives cheat the issue of suspense vs. surprise, showing the
adversary’s viewpoint at certain junctures and withholding it at others. If
you write with sufficient brio the audience may not notice.
E T
You may envision a detailed series of antecedent events underlying the
significance of the goal. Tolkien’s One Ring, for example, forms the core of
a shadow narrative about Middle Earth’s ancient history. The more facts
you need to establish about the past, or the imagined workings of science or
magic in your setting, the more space you’ll devote to information beats,
which slow your pacing and complicate your scene ordering. Think of such
moments as ones in which you must stop your narrative to pay an
exposition toll. By requiring many such moments, you’re placing a bet that
the richness of your imagined world will more than compensate for the time
you must devote to revealing it.
Try to boil any backstory surrounding the villain’s plan into as small a
package of information as possible. As you build out your sequence of
events, you may then find a place to fit in additional evocative details in a
way that speeds rather than slows your pacing—for example, by making
them critical to particular obstacles the heroes face in their struggle to stop
the adversary.
When you begin to construct your scene sequence, you’ll then ask
yourself how far into the plan the adversary has advanced when the action
begins. From there you’ll work out the first steps the adversary will
undertake to complete the plan, and how these draw the hero into the
narrative. Notes on that process begin in the section Building Incidents as
You Map.
P L
Having sketched out what you know of your adversary plan, make a bullet
list of all the points of information the viewer will need to understand it.
During the coming outline phase you will then find spots to place them,
crossing them off your list as you go. If you write without an outline this
will happen during the first draft stage.
Does that list seem long to you? You might have cooked up an
unnecessarily convoluted adversary plan. Look for new connections
between elements of the plan that allow you to collapse your list into fewer
points of information, reducing the exposition tax you’ll have to pay when
you reach the writing stage.

Disorder Rises and the Hero Responds

The second question to pose before beginning to construct a procedural
narrative is:
How does the hero become aware of the adversary plan, in order to begin
to take action against it?
This opening moment can be characterized as the Rise of Disorder.
An efficient and thus frequently used opening device has a minor
character encounter the disorder caused by the adversary. This minor early
manifestation of the adversary plan harms or destroys the minor character,
creating an ominous down beat. Viewers experience a sense of unease by
proxy. When the hero enters the narrative we know not only that we want
broader society to be protected from the antagonist’s plan, but that the threat
it poses might also bring misfortune to our hero.
In a once-standard opening, the hero receives an assignment and briefing
from a superior and then goes out to investigate the first glimmerings of the
adversary’s plan. A variation of this occurs in the archetypal private
detective setup where a client approaches the hero to take on a case. This
has lost favor because it is both visually and emotionally static: it takes
place in an office and tells us why we should care instead of showing it.
Perhaps the adversary begins by directly targeting the hero or her
associates. This lands best with an iconic hero we already care about.
Fans of particular iconic heroes may want you to get into the story as
quickly as possible and won’t fault you so much for using a standard device
to get there. But if you can craft an unusual way for the hero to learn about
the disorder created by the adversary and start to come to grips with it, that
can’t hurt either.
In the case of a transformational hero, the opening must establish not only
the Rise of Disorder, but also the state the hero will transform from. These
need not occur in a particular order. In The Lord of the Rings we meet Frodo
in the bucolic environs of the Shire well before Gandalf gets down to
business and issues him his ring-bearing assignment. Star Wars sets up the
disorder and the villain long before we meet Luke and his restless desire to
move from zero to hero—with R2-D2 acting as focus character until Luke
finally appears in the narrative.

Bidirectional Plotting
After the hero meets, if not the adversary, then the outer edges of the
disorder caused by his plan, a typical procedural unfolds in two directions:
the antagonist takes actions to further the plan, and the hero takes actions to
understand and disrupt it. You may stay focused entirely on the viewpoint
of the hero, with events taken by the antagonist surfacing in the narrative
only when they are discovered by your focus character(s). Or you might
alternate between suspense-generating scenes of the villain advancing his
agenda and those depicting the hero moving toward discovery and
disruption. Either subtly or overtly, you’ll thus be plotting in two directions.
In a well-wrought plot, actions undertaken by the hero and the villain both
make sense in their own terms.
This is the obligatory point where I have to note that it is possible for a
story told with great verve to elide its way through plot holes, as per
Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep, which notoriously includes a murder
without a possible murderer. Still, even if you’re one of the founding titans
of a particular sub-genre, it’s best not to have a hole in the first place.

Arranging Seeds
The first seed of your story may have arisen in your mind as a particular
scene, situation, or visual image. If you’re like me, you’ve even written the
occasional story based on a compelling dream.
Often such a seed will clearly present itself to you as either the beginning
or ending of a narrative. In that case, you’re set. However, it might just as
easily belong somewhere in between. Note the seed on an index card, either
a literal physical one, or as a component in an electronic note-keeping
system.
If you’re beat mapping with software during the outline stage, generate it
as a free-floating beat you’ll work into your map or outline as needed.
When seat-of-the-pantsing a first draft, stick a physical card somewhere
where you can see it, and work toward a sequence of events that allows you
to introduce it.
Be careful not to saddle yourself with too many free-floating moments
you intend to work into a narrative. The more of these you accumulate, the
more likely you are to plot by treating them as puzzle pieces. Instead of
building a sequence of events that flows logically from the cause and effect
of procedural storytelling or the unmet desires of drama, you wind up with a
series of events contrived to connect a series of dots.
This can present a particular hazard when basing a work on an existing
property.
Okay, I’m supposed to write Monopoly: the Movie, so I guess the big
climax has to occur at Park Place…
…and we need a plutocrat character with a top hat…
…and somebody needs to go to jail…
…then something something Community Chest…
…utilities, we need a scene about utilities…
…maybe a shout out to the game’s origins as anti-capitalist propaganda…
…tip the hat to the crucial game designer demographic with an in-joke
about how crappy the game play is…
…oh, almost forgot the Scottie dog…
You can still assemble a plot from a large collection of seeds like this—it
may be a client’s requirement, even. The key here is to make note of them
and then set them aside. Build your sequence of events (in outline or first
draft, as your work method demands) from the adversary plan plus the
hero’s response, or as the unfolding of unmet dramatic needs. As you go
along, when the need for a new incident or obstacle arises, check your list
and see if any of the scenes or images can be molded to fit. This could be
described as plotting from the inside out, rather than from the outside in.
You’re building out from a foundation rather than stringing stuff together.
 5
Mapping Your Story
If you plan to free-wheel your first draft and subsequently map all or parts
of it out, skip ahead to the next chapter, appropriately titled “First Draft,”
and then come back here. Or you could just play along with the fiction that
you’re going to outline from a beat analysis diagram and continue to read
the book in order.
•••
Now it’s time to take all the foundational work we’ve done and begin to
turn it into a sequence of events, which we will render as a map, featuring
beat types, arrows that denote emotional rhythm, and transitions between
scenes.
In the case of an involved narrative with a large ensemble and/or multiple
plot threads, you may also wish to create a thread map, as described under
Thread Mapping.

Your Opener
Stories live and die by their opening scenes.
Whether the effect you’re aiming to exert is delicate, over-the-top, or
somewhere in between, no section of your story matters more than its first:

ten minutes (in the case of a movie or stage play)

thirty seconds (television episode or short film)
thirty pages (novel)
200 words (short story)
page (comic book)

In this fleeting window you either invite the audience to immediately

engage or set it adrift.
You can recover from a weak opening, but it happens more rarely than
you might think. And never fully.
 The audience wants to engage and expects to be oriented. They start out
on your side. All you need do is give them the tools to see what you’re
doing and the emotional hook that gives them a reason to care.
As quickly and economically as you can, use your opener to pose the
question.
When you pose the question, you introduce an element of suspense or
curiosity that touches on your core question, a protagonist’s dramatic poles,
and/or your throughline.
In the case of a dramatic protagonist, you might show the character pulled
toward one of her poles, while giving us reason to hope that she moves
away from that state.
Likewise, you could open on your transformational hero, in a scene that
shows why the starting point of her arc is unsatisfactory.
Ironically, showing our dramatic protagonist or transformational hero in a
state of happy satisfaction puts the audience on edge. Instinctively if not
consciously we know we’re seing a state of bliss right before everything
goes to hell. We fear this and become engaged.
When writing an iconic hero, you might instead open with the rise of
disorder, establishing a bad situation we hope someone (soon to be revealed
as our hero) can fix.
In many stories the true core question becomes evident a few scenes (but
not too many scenes) after the opener. You might instead open by showing
the protagonist facing a nascent or prefigured version of it.
As you’ll see in the case studies presented later, an opening beat often
poses the question in a manner that appears casual and offhand on first
viewing, but in retrospect stands as an extremely clear introduction of the
story’s central conflict or thesis.

Weak Openings
A huge fist-in-the face opening might jolt the audience into a state of
attention, but is hard to establish emotional context for. Unless we’re
already invested—for example, because we’re rejoining a serial hero we
already identify with from previous installments—the audience may be
more confused than intrigued. When you go big in your opener, make sure
you’ve got a way to top it later.
Don’t start with exposition.
You may be able to write a compelling mini-story unto itself that then sets
the table for the real story to come. Even if you do, you then have to start all
over again. Readers will resent having the story they were first encouraged
to care about taken away from them, and the effort of reengaging with the
actual story. An extremely deft transition, in which the prologue story
seamlessly becomes the main narrative, can fix that, but that’s more easily
described than executed.
The extended montage of establishing exposition has become a common
device in films set in imagined worlds. It is almost always the sign of a
script that has lost its internal coherence over multiple rewrites, and a waste
of those precious moments of open attention from the audience.
If we need information to follow your story, begin instead with a reason to
care about a character or situation. Then give us the exposition, when we
have an emotional reason to want it.
Audience expectations allowed 19th century novelists to open with
commentary beats, moving from an essay-like portrait of society to their
characters and our hopes and fears for them.
It is no longer the best of times or the worst of times, so think more than
twice about attempting that maneuver now. It requires you to pull the reader
into your essay through the sheer rhythmic verve of your writing, and then
requires you to shift out of that without having solved the real problem of
posing your opening question.

Parallel Openings
A story featuring multiple protagonists each driving separate subplots calls
for multiple openings, in which a question is posed in turn for each of them.
Moving between these parallel openers means using a bunch of Break
transitions, which cost you momentum. Audiences can resent being taken
out of a scene they are already invested in so they can meet an unfamiliar
character or situation. Present these with as much economy as you can
muster without being repetitively mechanical about it. The longer you wait
to introduce a new subplot and focus character, the more readers resist the
effort required to care about her.
On the other hand, having introduced a number of apparently unrelated
main characters brings with it an implicit suspense, as readers wonder just
how they will all eventually intersect.

Flourish Beats as Preludes

You can get away with setting a mood before posing a question, if you keep
it quick, or if the flourish beat is a Gratification and really freaking stunning
in its own right.
An establishing shot, or its prose equivalent, can function as mood-setting
Gratification or Bringdown. The latter would be your proverbial dark and
stormy night, as the author describes the wind-lashed road, then the battered
coach making its way along that road, before finally introducing the young
woman inside as she first lays eyes on the dread manor at the top of the hill.
The extended Bringdown beat that comprises the credits sequence of
Kubrick’s The Shining mesmerizes with its unusual distorted helicopter
photography. Visually it actually does pose the film’s core question, or a
version of it, about man’s ability to survive in the vast isolation of an
indifferent universe.
A jaw-dropping splash page in a comic book could function as an opening
Gratification beat, undoubtedly also commenting on the universe in which
the story takes place.
In film, a delightful credits sequence with great music can excite the
audience, setting the opening tone and counting as a Gratification beat.

Case Studies: Classic Movie Openings

With their distilled storytelling and relative easy accessibility, classic films
provide ideal examples of strong, clear, opening beats. Let’s look at the
openers of some classic titles and see how tightly each poses its core
question.
The first beat of Bringing Up Baby (1938) has Alice Swallow, forbidding
fiancée to co-protagonist David Huxley, prevent a colleague from
interrupting him while he’s thinking. A paleontologist, he poses like
Rodin’s thinker on a platform next to an assembled dinosaur skeleton.
Huxley’s dramatic poles are thinking vs. acting. His static pose and ossified
surroundings show him stuck in the first of these two positions.
Cat People (1942) opens with its protagonist, Irena Reed, at the zoo,
sketching a jaguar. Unsatisfied with the results, she crumples up the page
from her sketchpad and throws it away. She attempts to come to terms with
the jaguar and fails. This is what we will see her doing throughout the
movie, as her dramatic poles are woman vs. beast.
The opening beat of Double Indemnity (1944) shows an out-of-control car
veering through Los Angeles’ streets. Inside, we soon discover, is wounded
insurance salesman Walter Neff, and that opening visual shows him at the
latter end of his smarts vs. recklessness dramatic opposition.
Far From Heaven (2002) begins with a bucolic credits sequence evoking
the high ‘50s style of director Douglas Sirk, who Haynes will pastiche
throughout. We see protagonist Cathy Whitaker get into a car and drive
from an idealized main street to her home. When it concludes, her young
son petitions her for permission to sleep over at a friend’s house. In this
low-key dramatic scene, from which the camera distances the viewer, she
ever-so-reasonably refuses him, citing his obligation to the family. This
introduces the first side of her conformity vs. selfhood poles, which will go
on to drive her conflict when she involves herself in adultery across the
racial divide.
I’m mostly not counting title sequences here, but the pulsing techno and
vertiginous computer animation of Fight Club (1999) viscerally engages
emotions and poses that film’s question. It begins with a firing synapse in
the brain, then zooms rapidly out, finally exiting through the perspiring
forehead of its unnamed narrator, played by Edward Norton. The sequence
establishes the film’s tone and energy while introducing the character’s
dramatic poles: reality vs. delusion. As if that isn’t sufficiently on-the-nose
on subsequent viewings, the first line of voice-over literally puts the
question as a question: “People are always asking me if I know Tyler
Durden.” Since he is (spoilers) Tyler Durden and the theme is self-
knowledge, this opening couldn’t cut more clearly to the heart of the piece.
But because we’re not oriented yet and much indirection lies before us, we
lack the context to see what this really means.
Nights of Cabiria (1957) opens on the undeveloped outskirts of Rome. A
handsome man playfully chases the title character (Giulietta Masina), to her
clear delight. This up beat is immediately followed by a down beat:
reaching a riverbank, the man looks around to see if anyone is watching,
then grabs her purse and pushes her into a river. Together the two beats
present her dramatic poles: optimism vs. realism, particularly where
dealings with men are concerned. If you haven’t seen that film but
remember the moment, you’re recalling it in its Shirley MacLaine form,
from the opening of its musical adaptation, Sweet Charity (1966).
The very first beat of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) is a sly visual pun
aimed at seasoned film buffs; the Paramount logo, featuring a mountain,
crossfades into an actual mountain. This brief Gratification beat sets the
tone, for those in the know, for cinematic nostalgia. Then Indiana Jones
looms into a view, striking a silhouetted pose signaling his iconic hero
status. We then see him traverse a jungle, visually demonstrating his iconic
ethos: he overcomes disorder with his expertise as an explorer and
archaeologist.

Stories are Like Parties—Best Arrive Late

A strong opening not only poses a question but moves as far as possible
into the story’s sequence of events without confusing the audience or
leaving out crucial protagonist choices.
This may be an issue you spot later, either after you’ve outlined for a
while, or during first draft or revision. Emerging writers often start their
narratives too far back in the chronology, with a series of less than
energized incidents that could best be handled as backstory, revealed
through information beats.
You may notice this immediately, when you envision an opening scene
and find that you can’t get it to pose your question. That’s because the story
hasn’t really started yet.
Begin when the conflict starts, and the protagonist must take action to
resolve it.

But Not Too Late

On the other hand, if you find that your initial sequences are clogged with
Reveal and Pipe beats, you may have taken the above dictum too far,
launching so far into the narrative that a big chunk of it must be dredged up
retroactively from the antecedent action. To fix this, search the backstory
for a moment in which one of your protagonists might be faced with a
compelling choice. Start there instead, identifying ways to present those
prior events as engaging scenes with posed questions that activate our hopes
and fears for a focus character.

Your First Arrow

Before moving to the mapping part, identify your very first beat’s emotional
impact:
 If it leads the audience toward fear and away from hope, you will
shortly be marking it with a down arrow.
If it leads toward hope and away from fear, it’s an up arrow.
If it does neither, your opening scene is weak and develops
nothing. Rethink and come up with an opener with an emotional
consequence.
If it does both, ask yourself if your opening scene is too
complicated. Ambiguity and mixed emotions lie at the heart of
the most profound literature, but only after the reader has
acquired the context to appreciate them. Consider a clearer
starting point from which to build your emotional complexity. If
the brilliance of the beat withstands this scrutiny, you will soon
mark it with crossed arrows.

And Now For the Map Part

Having arrived at your opening beat, you are now ready to place it on the
beat map.
Various computer mapping tools allow you to create diagrams using our
icons, which you can grab by heading to the Gameplaywright website,
gameplaywright.net. Because technology changes over time, I won’t waste
space here describing methods that may have been superseded by the time
you read this text, but rather refer you to the site for our latest word on story
cartography tools.
We number the beat maps provided later in this book for ease of
reference. Unless you’re planning to share the diagrams with someone else
and want to refer to beats by number, you don’t need to do that. In the
outline phase you’ll be changing the order of beats when you cut or
interpolate new beats into your sequence, and having to recalculate the
numbers becomes a big nuisance.
Place the first beat icon on the map. This is probably a Dramatic or
Procedural beat, but might be a Gratification or Bringdown. If my dire
imprecations against starting with exposition have failed to sway you, the
chance exists that you’re laying down a Reveal beat. The dreaded Reveal
without a previous Question.
Under the icon, place a brief phrase reminding you of the event associated
with the beat.
Now follow it with the arrow denoting its impact on emotional rhythm:
up, down, crossed, or lateral.
Let’s return to our dramatic example from “Blocked Desires” (see
Blocked Desires). You’ve decided that your first beat should subtly
introduce the dramatic poles of your main character, Holly Moss. Since you
composed that chart, you’ve settled on her dramatic poles: healer vs.
controller. Choosing an entry point into the story, you decide to show Holly
and her husband, Tom, already on the way to visit his mother for the first
time. This allows you to start with an oblique version of the central conflict,
showing Tom’s unspoken unease over the visit. That’s the subtext. You
decide that the text of their understated conflict—what they’re actually
talking about—will concern her healing side. You envision her noticing a
cut on Tom’s hand while he’s driving. She asks to look at it; he tries to
conceal his irritation, minimizing its importance. Although by no means a
histrionic scene, she’s nonetheless making a petition that he gently rebuffs.
The beat is Dramatic (it’s a conflict over an emotional reward) and ends
on a down note (we don’t know Holly and Tom that well yet, but we can
sense the distance between them). So you mark it with a down arrow.

Now let’s map the first beat of a procedural example. You’re writing an
installment of the adventures of Diana Chu, teen investigator. Her iconic
ethos: she keeps supernatural horrors at bay with the aid of her steely
resolve and the powers she absorbed from the ghost of her dead twin sister.
This first beat isn’t about her, though; you’re choosing instead to open with
the Rise of Disorder. Your seed for this one is the phrase “horror in a gated
community.” So you start with that: the security guard for an upscale
residential neighborhood, at night, hears a strangled cry in the bushes and,
flashlight in hand, heads toward them to investigate.
That’s a Procedural beat, as it concerns an external problem (finding out
what’s in the bushes) and it ends on a down arrow (marking a note of
unease, as the guard’s response suggests that something has gone awry).
You might break the rustling bushes into two beats: first a Question, then
the guard’s response of looking at them with his flashlight as a second
Procedural beat. Since you’re creating a reference for yourself, not writing
an academic analysis for someone else to mark, you go with the most
economical expression you will be able to recognize later.

Building Incidents as You Map

Mostly, when outlining using beat maps, you’ll devise plot incidents the
same way you would when working with a prose outline. You envision
events, follow their logical consequences, and fold in previously envisioned
story seeds as you move from premise to storyline. The outline records but
does not alter your original choices.
Now and then, however, you might spot a rhythmic issue brewing and
add, rearrange, or adjust beats to fix it. Too many arrows pointing in the
same direction for too long points to a deadening rhythm that will cause
audience members to check out.
A cluster of down arrows might suggest that your drama has become
dourer than intended. Give your character a victory, whether it means
altering the tenor of an existing Dramatic scene or inserting one in which
her petition can be granted without breaking from the characters’
established desires and personalities. As always, see to it that inserted
scenes develop the core question in some way.
Too many Dramatic up arrows in a row instead indicates that you’re being
too easy on your protagonists, and that someone or something in your story
ought to tighten the screws on them. Again, you can invent a new scene to
do that, or adjust a current one.
Clusters of crossed arrows might point to a muddle, where no one ever
suffers a clear emotional win or loss. Ambiguity loses its power when
overused, introducing an untethered, meandering rhythm. Lean harder on
some of those beats, forcing them to land with greater decisiveness.
 On the procedural front, an abundance of consecutive down arrows
suggests that your story has turned into something of a slog. Audiences
expect more vicarious gratification from their procedurals than from
dramas, and you don’t want them to pull away from your hero in despair, or
come to question whether they’ve placed their trust in an unwise, unlucky,
or incompetent hero. Throw your character a bone or two before re-
invoking the impossible odds she still faces.
Too many triumphs in a row shows you where you’re losing suspense.
Victories follow the law of diminishing returns when clustered together,
each providing less uplift than the last. Fortunately, introducing beats that
increase our hero’s problems, or simply threaten to do so, is the easiest task
in procedural writing.
Ambiguous outcomes in Procedural beats are less satisfying in drama.
Instead of invoking the eternal contradictions of the human experience, they
simply make the literal progress against the adversary’s plan hard for the
audience to parse. Every so often the classic, “Do you want to hear the good
news first, or the bad news?” situation can land with enjoyable irony. But it
doesn’t bear much repetition.
In either story type, keep an eye on your information beats. Where
possible, avoid Reveals without preceding Questions to make us want the
exposition they provide. Information thrives in your story’s setup. The
further into it you go, the harder it becomes to introduce exposition without
killing your momentum.
Answer any outstanding Questions before the story’s climax begins.
If you can’t do that, do it before it ends. Dialogue that ties up loose ends
after the conflict has been resolved is always flabby and leaves you exiting
on a listless, sloppy note.
Also, restrict your story’s diet of flourish beats. Every moment you
include that departs from your throughline or arises gratuitously pulls the
reader out of the experience.

Noting Transitions
Whenever your story jumps ahead in time or switches to another locale,
mark the transition type with an icon placed next to the larger beat icon,
near the emotional rhythm arrow.
The first scene shift in our procedural example occurs after an unseen
creature attacks the security guard. The next scene occurs in the same
location, but hours later, in daylight, where we see his head mounted on the
wall that surrounds the gated community. The second scene arises as a
direct consequence of the first—the guard gets attacked, and now we see
what happened to him. So you mark this as an Outgrowth.

In our dramatic example, Holly and Tom realize they’re on edge for reasons
unrelated to a cut on his hand and agree to take it easy on each other over
the coming weekend. Then we cut to Juliette’s cabin, where she awakens
with a jolt on her couch, a couple of empty vodka bottles lying nearby on
the floor. This is happening at the same time but in a different place, so you
mark the transition as a Meanwhile.

How devoutly you note scene changes depends on how informative you
find the process. If a scene change won’t register as such with the audience,
I personally skip it.
For example, in a sequence where the characters travel from one place to
another and then end up in a final key location for a while, I’d generally just
mark the transition in the last of the travel scenes. But if the gaps in time
within the travel sequence become somehow noteworthy to the audience,
I’d mark each individually.
When one dramatic scene follows another chronologically without
changing locations, with only the participating characters changing, you
could mark this with a Continuation or Outgrowth icon. But unless you plan
on underlining the shift between the two, you might as well omit the
transition icon altogether.
If using the map to analyze rather than to create, you may instead prefer a
more stringent approach, noting even the most minor of transitions.
As you outline, be aware of the strength of your transitions in relation to
one another.
In a piece featuring multiple plotlines, a large number of Continuations
and Outgrowths in a row may suggest that you need to check back in with
one of your other storylines. Otherwise the audience may forget its details
or lose emotional investment in it. You may wish to insert a break to give
viewers time with a character whose absence from the proceedings has
frustrated them. When you can manage an Outgrowth that connects two
subplots, you get the best of both worlds. Disregard this advice if you’re
thread mapping (see Thread Mapping); you have a clearer way to see
whether storylines are dropping from view.
A large sequence of Breaks may point to a choppy rhythm that never
gives readers a chance to settle into one situation before ping-ponging off in
another direction. Or it may indicate an overcomplicated storyline that
could stand being collapsed into a simpler line of cause-and-effect.
Just as emotional rhythms should vary unpredictably, a thudding
predictability will descend on your story if you always cut between scenes
after the same word/time count (not beats necessarily), so look for ways to
vary the pace at which you weave between characters or subplots. Beats
don’t tell you how long a sequence takes to play out, but you can generally
eyeball the difference between a quicksilver moment and an extended
exchange of dialogue between characters.

Your Sequence of Events

Your main sequence of events consists of:

a series of Procedural beats

a series of Dramatic beats
or, in the most likely case, some mixture of the two

You may start with some, but probably not all, of these in mind before you
begin to build your narrative in earnest. Your starting point might be:
 a beat map, as this chapter assumes
a set of index cards you will now arrange into a chronology
a point form text document
a prose outline, a fully written but condensed version of your
story in text form

Getting Through Stall-Outs

Whatever the mixture of beats and format of the end product, your process
may take you seamlessly from beginning to end in a single, flowing, linear
sequence of scenes.
In which case, congratulations! You have aroused my envy and that of
nearly every other writer in your field.
More likely, at some point you’ll encounter the bane of the outlining
writer, the stall-out. This occurs when you reach a point in the narrative that
requires the creation of a new incident or incidents in order to keep moving
to other events the story isn’t yet ready to incorporate—but no such incident
comes readily to mind.
“How,” the writer wonders, “do I get from here…to there?”
In a drama, you may find that you’ve coursed through all of the available
unmet desires and can’t see where to go next. The solution may lie in a
change of circumstances that alters one of the character’s Blocks or Desires,
or gives new impetus to the pursuit of the existing ones.
In a procedural, plot gaps tend to be, appropriately enough, practical in
nature. You’ve advanced the adversary’s scheme to a particular point, or
shown the hero countering it, and now need to invent the action or reaction
that leads the hero to a fresh obstacle. This may be simply a matter of
spending time—perhaps away from the writing desk—letting your mind
wander until it comes up with an answer for you.
In both dramas or procedurals, you might find the next scene by looking
at your store of unused scene seeds.
Or you could use the shape of the beat map.
Does your story contain a mix of Dramatic and Procedural beats?
Consider adding a Dramatic beat, which then leads to a changed external
situation.
In a purely dramatic story, look at the last three or four emotional notes. If
down notes predominate, imagine a scene in which one character finds good
reason to meet another’s previously rebuffed petitions. Conversely, in the
less likely case that you’ve been letting them get along too well, search for
an internally motivated reason for one of the characters to start resisting one
or more of the others.
In a procedural narrative, the technique of looking at the arrows in the
immediately preceding beats also applies—and, as a bonus, is often easier
to implement. If your hero has been blocked and frustrated, give her a win
that reminds us of her competency. Has your hero been overcoming all of
her obstacles for the last little while? Devise a tougher challenge that slows
down or temporarily reverses her progress.
Be careful when writing an iconic hero that this daunting obstacle
somehow takes her outside the purview of her problem-solving ethos. Your
genius detective shouldn’t suddenly make a deductive blunder—but she
might be set back by the threat of being shot, a cut brake line, or an elephant
stampede. The bold space pilot won’t be outflown, but he might fall prey to
alien mind control, a tear in the time continuum, or the betrayal of a trusted
friend.
Any scene you create to bridge a gap must arise naturally from the story’s
established emotional or practical status quo. A scene that too obviously
comes out of nowhere to get you out of a rough patch will read as contrived.
Except in meta-fiction, you don’t want the reader to see the authorial hand
reaching into the toolbox for its story-mashing hammer.
When in doubt, leave a space in your map, so you can fill in the beats
later. As you continue your map, you might for example find a sequence
that needs to be set up with prior Pipe beats. That might inspire you to
invent a moment that acts as a Pipe beat and also bridges a still-yawning
gap between moments.
Remember that a beat that solves your emotional rhythm problem but
does not further the story counts as a mere flourish beat: Gratification if it
provides an up note, Bringdown when…well, it’s right in the name, isn’t it?

Using Key Elements to Overcome Stall-Outs

When you know what sort of foundation beat you need and the emotional
note you want it to strike, but still can’t find inspiration for the actual
incident or scene, return to your core elements.
 Check in on the state of your core question. What would the
answer to that question be if the story ended here? What might
happen to pivot a character toward the opposite answer to that
question?
In a dramatic story, envision incidents that might arise from the
circumstances currently in play that would confront a key
protagonist with a choice between his dramatic poles.
In a procedural starring a transformational hero, envision
incidents arising from recent plot developments that might push
the character either toward, or away from, her transformation.
In a procedural driven by an iconic hero, envision a problem
arising from a recent success or failure that the hero can attempt
to solve using her iconic ethos.
If none of these scene triggers bring anything to mind, remind
yourself of your throughline, envisioning scenes that spark from
recent developments to show movement from one side of the
opposition to the other.

You probably noted the absence from this list of a key plot driver, the
procedural’s adversary plan. If the answer to “how do I move on from
here?” is “the adversary launches the next step in her plan,” you have no
need to consult the above list, because you never stalled out in the first
place.
C Q E
The core question of your college comedy is “Will Sarah finally grow up?”
In the last scene her supervisor warned her that her latest escapade has his
colleagues thinking they should not renew her T.A. contract next semester.
If the story ended now, she’d remain mired in her immaturity. So you
decide to create a scene in which she makes a bid for maturity, announcing
to her train-wreck roommates that it’s time they stopped living like animals
and turned their lives around.
D P E
You’re writing a drama about Juhi, who finally starts to push back against
the lifelong hold her brilliant yet demanding younger sister has always held
over her. You need to follow up a scene where the sister, Aria, maneuvers
her into agreeing to take over the family restaurant—meaning that Juhi will
do all the work with Aria calling the shots. You’ve shown Juhi stuck in this
situation. Aria has what she wants, and has no reason to initiate a new
scene. So Juhi has to seize her agency. Her dramatic poles are “compliance
vs. defiance,” so to get past this stall-out you need to show her moving
away from her current position of compliance to one of defiance. This
sparks an idea—she calls in a management consultant for advice on how to
run the restaurant, which will threaten Aria’s need for control.
T A E
Seoul police inspector Yun-seok Park’s transformative arc is “mourning to
rebirth.” You have laid in a series of beats advancing his procedural quest
for a kidnapped girl who reminds him of his recently deceased daughter. He
just hit a dead end in his investigation, and you don’t want to immediately
move on to a new break in the case without first having the emotional
impact of that register on him, and thus the audience. You ask yourself how
this might push him back toward the mourning side of the arc. This question
sparks a dramatic scene in which Park overhears his dickish superior rudely
psychoanalyzing him, declaring that he thinks that solving this case will
bring his daughter back. Park then confronts him, putting his career even
further in jeopardy. Now it feels right to move on to the next procedural
development.
I E E
In her latest sword-and-planet adventure, stranded astronaut Merata Selwyn
protects villagers from colonists who want to enslave them. The aliens want
to make them dig up their sacred mountain for the viridium ore it contains.
You need an early first step for Merata to take toward that goal. Her iconic
ethos is: “uses her knowledge of Earth history to solve problems on her new
planet.” Remembering that Spanish silver miners in the Americas used
samurai as guards for their shipments, you decide that maybe the bad guys
employ mercenaries from a culture other their own, and that Merata can
investigate their situation in search of an advantage she can use against the
slavers.
T E
Your multigenerational saga following a family through the history of the
airline industry uses the throughline “power vs. responsibility.” An empty
space glares at you from your beat map, starting after the funeral for the
founder/patriarch character. Since his demise tips the balance in the family
from responsibility to power, you realize that you need a Dramatic beat that
shows this. You see that the next beat should further underline that shift,
showing under-valued second son Albert cooking up a plan to launch a
hostile takeover of a family friend’s competing airline.

Placing Exposition
The ideal placement of information, from exposition to surprise revelations,
poses an always-daunting challenge to the fiction writer.
Procedurals, with their emphasis on external obstacles, make extensive
use of information beats.
Dramatic narratives tend to use fewer of them, but fewer might not mean
zero. Plenty of dramatic narratives, from Oedipus Rex to Hamlet to Buried
Child turn on the revelation of long-concealed secrets.
A benefit of starting with the beat map is that it helps greatly with the
placement of exposition, always one of the trickier tasks before the writer.

Punching Up Briefing Beats

Information the audience needs to understand in order to care about later
procedural sequences quickly leaches the energy from your storytelling.
This becomes the dreaded infodump in which the protagonist receives a
briefing or lecture. And if there are two words in the English language that
conjure excitement, “briefing” and “lecture” are not them. Without
emotional context, they become a dry, pro forma sequence the audience at
best tolerates in hopes of quickly moving on to the entertaining stuff.
Looking at this in beat terms points to several methods of building
emotional reward into what would otherwise play as dry briefing scenes.

Answer a previous question. When you make readers curious

about something, you induce a state of mild anxiety. Later on,
when you provide the answer they were hoping to get, they feel a
sense of positive reward. When making your beat map, look for
an earlier spot in your narrative sequence where you can
smoothly insert a Question beat that establishes audience
 curiosity. Here readers engage with the information because
you’ve already given them reason to care.
Make the focus character work for it. When the protagonist
passively takes in information from a willing source, or easily
acquires it in some other way (an uneventful trip to the town
records hall, let’s say), viewers get no particular kick out of it.
But if instead she must overcome an obstacle to get the
information, we first feel the difficulty of the effort as a down
beat, and regard the information itself as a reward for success.
The obstacle might take the form of a reluctant witness whose
resistance must be somehow countered, or some physical
impediment, like a locked door or security system the protagonist
must get past without being discovered.
Get to it right away. The audience will also tolerate a straight
chunk of exposition situated very early in your piece, as part of
the price of getting oriented and identifying what one’s hopes and
fears for the protagonist ought to be. (Of course viewers aren’t
consciously thinking about this, unless they’ve read this book
and are mentally clocking your beats.) Though still a weaker
choice than the above, you may find it’s the least convoluted way
to get started, paying a quick exposition toll and getting on with
it.

Let’s return once more to Diana Chu and the gated community horror.
You’ve decided that the creature she faces is a tulpa, an incarnate thought-
form that takes on qualities people project onto it.
To defeat it, Diana must first discover what it is.
The audience must go on this informational journey with her, coming to
understand what a tulpa is and what fictional rules govern its behavior and
weaknesses in order to follow your story.
You could have her sidekick, researcher and tentative love interest Samira
Kane, simply tell her, after her first meeting with the beast. “Hey that
sounds like a tulpa—originally thought to be from Tibetan mythology but in
fact a misunderstood reference to Buddhist tradition by a Western occultist
—which somehow took on psychic power of its own and began to manifest
all around the world starting in 1918…” But that’s the flat way to do it.
Alternately, you could set it up by laying in a Question beat. Inside the
community walls, Diana bumps into another paranormal investigator, an
older New Age practitioner named Helen Wagner who says she believes a
misguided tulpa is at work here. Before she can further explain, the creature
attacks, killing her. Now we want to know what the rest of that sentence
would have been. After Diana escapes the monster and returns to her
headquarters under the town library, Samira can provide the above info—
but now it relieves the frustration we feel about having had it withheld from
us earlier.

Or you could play the rival investigator differently, so that instead of

sharing what she knows, she refuses to help Diana, treating her as a reckless
kid apt to get herself killed. When the creature attacks, Diana saves her life
and gets her to safety, at which point she provides the information. Now it
gives us an up arrow, as the older woman has granted the character we
identify with the respect we know she deserves.
Q F .E V
Constraints of screen time or word count may sometimes motivate you to
accept the weaker choice of a straight-up infodump. That’s one of the many
trade-offs you’ll wrestle with when writing within the limitations of a strict
format. Even without such limitations, sometimes the time or space it takes
to make a scene more interesting throws off your pacing, and the best of
two bad choices is to do it the flat but straightforward way.

Procedural Pipe
As you write procedural obstacles you may come up with details that would
play like cheats or contrivances if not established in advance. While
outlining with your beat map, you can then look for the right spot to
unobtrusively drop in the bit that will justify your action in retrospect. If
adding a Pipe beat after you’ve mapped your narrative line, you might scan
for a transition other than an Outgrowth and drop it in there.
For the shootout scene in the karaoke bar, you need your assassin
character, Jeff, to have a gun. You realize that it will defy credibility if the
clever mob boss who runs the joint fails to have him patted down before
they meet. So you fit in a prior scene in which Jeff has a box under his arm,
bumps into a very distinctive looking guy on the street, and then walks
away without the box.
This allows you to then introduce the karaoke club scene with a moment
where the guy walks out as Jeff heads in. Jeff receives his pat-down, meets
for a while with the mob boss, then excuses himself to head to the
washroom. There waits the box, already open, with a pistol inside.
Realizing that the audience will likely want to see Jeff’s mystery
accomplice acknowledged in some other way, you follow up the
assassination sequence with a quick moment in which he pays the guy off
as he gets on a boat for parts unknown.

Foreshadowing Dramatic Revelations

Dramatic narratives frequently turn on revelations about the characters’
collective pasts, which exert a bombshell effect on their desires and unmet
needs in the present.
The emotional impact of such Reveals can vary depending on how you
frame them.
 Reveals that come out of nowhere may cause your audience to withdraw
from your narrative out of a sense of betrayal. They’ve formed attachments
to the characters based on a presentation you now suddenly show to be
false. The resulting sense of disorientation may add power to your story, if
you can deftly perform the extra storytelling work required to draw the
audience back in to your abruptly reconfigured emotional landscape.
More often you’ll want to prepare for your story’s truth bombs to explode
under more controlled conditions. Foreshadow the Reveal through the
judicious use of Pipe or Question beats. When using this technique, the
Reveal instead plays as the surprising satisfaction of an expectation you’ve
already established.
When you do this with a Pipe beat, viewers in retrospect see that you laid
the groundwork for the Reveal without having thought much about it
beforehand. When you do it with a Question, you create a sense of curiosity
that will nag at them until the Reveal occurs.
The difference between a Pipe beat and a Question is essentially a matter
of emphasis. In the first case you foreshadow the eventual Reveal indirectly,
perhaps while seeming to establish something else entirely. In the case of a
Question beat you clearly invite the audience to wonder what’s going on.
For example, in your dramatic story, perhaps you decide that your
climactic pivot occurs when the great unspoken shame between Tom and
Juliette comes out. When he was a kid, she abandoned him in a hot car,
requiring a rescue from paramedics. After the incident betrayed child and
neglectful mom both carried on as if nothing had happened—but Tom still
looks at the world through the lens of that profound betrayal, and Juliette
ended her career, afraid that continued notoriety would someday lead to
someone digging up the story.
You choose to set this up during Tom and Holly’s drive up to visit his
mother.
The subliminal, Pipe version of the beat might have Holly leave Tom in
their car as she pops into a roadside convenience stop to buy a replacement
charger for her phone. As soon as she gets inside the store, Tom jumps out
of the car to the gas bar, where he grabs a squeegee and starts to clean the
windscreen. This need to busy himself signals that he’s nervous about the
upcoming visit, but doesn’t underline the fact that he never sits in a parked
car alone. You portray it as a tic even he isn’t aware of.
The Question version of the same beat plays out with the following
differences: Tom gets out of the car and just paces around. When Holly
emerges from the store, he furtively jumps back in the car. Here he appears
aware of his tic and anxious to conceal it from his wife. This more overtly
odd behavior invites us to wonder just what the heck is going on with him.

Reiterated Question Beats

In some cases, you may find it necessary to repeat a question at various
points to keep it active in the reader’s mind, before paying it off with the
corresponding Reveal beat. So you might write more than one Question
beat, all of which culminate in a single Reveal. Any writer of any
experience level, on any project, can expect to be vexed by the question of
how much repetition your story requires or can stand. Too much and readers
grow impatient; too little and they get confused. In general, dramatic
storytelling, where the writer, director, and editor control the pacing and can
assume the viewer watches the piece with few or no breaks, tolerates less
reiteration than the novel, which the reader completes in multiple sittings,
possibly with long breaks between them. Make reiterated Question beats
more acceptable to readers who don’t need them by placing them in
different contexts each time they appear.

Recaps
In serialized fiction you may need to revisit information already revealed in
prior installments, as some time may have passed since your viewer
watched the episode whose threads you are now picking up. You might do
the same in prose fiction piece too long to be read in a single sitting.
The urge to recap in a film or other work meant to be consumed in one go
suggests an overcomplicated plot. You might be better off simplifying the
burden of information the audience must bear than giving it to them all over
again.
Be doubly wary of the stock scene in which a character recounts not just
the plot but comments on how outlandish and unlikely it all is. This
suggests a lack of faith in the plausibility of your own plotting, which you
are now hoping to wink your way out of.
Recaps cause pacing problems when viewers don’t need them.
Unfortunately we come to that problem again: different audience members
take in and retain information at varying rates.
To lessen the pacing tax you pay for introducing them, add something new
to the reiteration of previous material: a fresh emotional reaction from one
of the characters, or a previously unrevealed nugget of exposition that
throws the rest in a new light.

Climactic Reveals
Often the Reveal introduces a new Question reflecting the changed situation
or understanding it establishes. Reveals during the climax finally answer the
biggest, most salient Questions raised by the core question.

Loose End Reveals

Reveals appearing in your denouement tie up loose ends, satisfying reader
curiosity about unanswered Questions. The heavy plotting of a mystery
novel often requires an extended passage of text in which loose ends are
dispatched. As the reader’s emotional engagement drops to nearly zero after
the resolution of a story’s central dilemma, you want to confine this to as
few beats as possible.
If you reach this stage of your outlining or mapping and see that you have
a large number of loose ends to explain away, examine each with the
mission of pulling as many as possible back into the main action. Better yet,
see if you can streamline the details of your plot to so that you never need to
introduce these Questions in the first place.
If you still have gaps to bridge, you may find yourself able to see new
beats that make perfect sense for your underused character or storyline. You
might find inspiration from the scenes you want to bridge, looking for
thematic parallels or ways to cross previously unconnected threads.

Combination Beats
Some beats serve more than one narrative purpose.
A beat can be both Dramatic, resolving an emotional conflict between two
characters, and Procedural, bringing about a change for better or worse in
the protagonist’s external circumstances.
When information is hidden, brought into question or revealed in a
Dramatic or Procedural beat, you may wish to make a note of that as well,
to more easily track the placement of exposition in your story. Some writers
using the beat system will prefer to break these into two separate beats;
others, to stack two beat icons on top of one another.
 An example of a combination beat occurs in The X-Files episode “Home”
(see beat 19), where Procedural progress and an amusing Dramatic
interchange between the two leads go hand-in-hand.
To keep your map clear of visual clutter, note only the combination beats
that really strike you as important. Otherwise, you can safely default to:

(if the lesser beat is an information beat) the foundation beat

(if both beats are foundation beats) a Dramatic beat, on the
grounds that the emotional line of the story matters more than the
logistical

Flourish beats never combine with other beats. By definition, they mark
moments that do not advance your story. Foundation and information beats
always develop the story.

Goal Shifts and Wavering Protagonists

In real life, we tend to have multiple goals in life, and waver between them
in a fitful, meandering way.
Fictional narratives generally edit away those quotidian shifts in purpose,
focusing on protagonists who want one thing and clearly pursue it. Maybe
in scenes not shown they’re taking care of a miscellany of unrelated tasks,
but in the story, procedural characters work to thwart an adversary plan and
dramatic characters pursue the fulfillment of an emotional desire.
Sequences in which the protagonists waver from their goals, pursue goals
incidental to their main goals, or seem to switch goals cause audiences to
draw away from your story. Adjust or remove them as early in the process
as you can.
Audiences take their sense of orientation in the narrative, and their
understanding of what they are meant to hope for and fear, from the
protagonists’ goals. When a story flies in the face of those expectations by
altering a protagonist’s goal midway through, viewers will pull back from
the story you’re telling.
This may be your intent, in which case you want that reaction.
Let’s say, however, that you wish to retain conventional audience
investment in your story. You will need to either:
 remove moments where the protagonist abandons, temporarily or
otherwise, the initially established or implied goal
or revisit your opener to introduce the hero’s true goal

Hamlet appears to waver considerably in the course of Shakespeare’s

eponymous play. His dramatic poles are action vs. contemplation, so this is
perfectly fitting. But although he agonizes over the burden he bears, he
never actually abandons his goal of thwarting Claudius, whose adversary
plan is: “Get away with murder.”
Stories in which the protagonist acts aimlessly are usually ones in which
the hero’s goal is to find a meaningful goal. Establish this in your opener
and the audience may grant you the leeway to explore an existential
narrative of this sort, provided you keep the emotional rhythm varied.
Some people do behave arbitrarily in real life. If your story exists to
explore the psychology of people like this, establish that expectation as
early in the story as you can. We trust such people even less in fiction than
we do in reality, a dynamic you may wish to give some thought to early,
while refining your premise. You might address this, for example, by telling
the story through a viewpoint figure acted upon by your unpredictable
character.
(More often, when someone we encounter in real life acts with seeming
randomness, the failure is observational—we don’t have enough context
about the person’s life to see what’s really driving them. As a writing
exercise, you might spend some time contemplating the most enigmatic
folks in your orbit and try to work out what makes them tick.)

Your Closer
Whatever structure you choose, eventually your narrative will move toward
a resolution. Though the nature of that conclusion varies according to
protagonist type, the shift toward it remains remarkably consistent through
all stories.
(Your experimental quasi-narrative may not move toward a resolution, but
if you’re writing one of those you stopped reading this book long before
now.)

Escalation Point
Some sort of ending probably came to you as part of your moment of initial
inspiration. Even writers who work seat-of-the-pants style usually have
some sort of provisional inkling as to where their characters might take
them. As you worked out your outline or draft, you may have discovered a
different conclusion that you now prefer.
Regardless of how your ending occurred to you, when you are ready to
write or outline it you will be able to identify an Escalation Point. This is
the spot in your narrative where events converge to pull the lead characters
to the resolution appropriate to their types. The Escalation Point puts into
the place the conditions for the conclusive answer to your core question.

Is Luke Skywalker a zero or hero? Bang, here’s the Death Star.

Will Indiana Jones stop the Nazis from using the Ark of the
Covenant? Bang, they’re about to conduct the ritual.
Will Macbeth enjoy the fruits of his crime? Bang, Macduff’s
forces are now advancing on Birnam Wood.
In a world where she must marry to thrive, will Elizabeth achieve
the right match? Bang, here’s Lady Catherine, having arrived to
thwart her desire to be with Mr. Darcy.
Will Jokerman maintain his carefully cultivated ironic distance
from the horrors of war? Bang bang bang, a sniper is firing at his
company and when he sees the shooter he’s going to find out.

The restatement of the core question might be evident to the reader, or

might not.

Luke doesn’t know at the Death Star briefing that it leads to the
moment that will mark his transformation.
Elizabeth Bennet has a pretty solid idea that all will be for naught
if Lady Catherine gets her way.

Whether obvious or subliminal, however, the reader can detect a

heightening of the stakes, a sharpening of hopes and fears.
From the Escalation Point on, a well-wrought conclusion refers to nothing
that does not move the character toward her final conclusion.
J D T
The Escalation Point in a dramatic narrative generally arises from a
decision made by a key protagonist. This choice may be one in which the
character permanently embraces one of her dramatic poles and rejects the
other. If so, ensure that this transformation occurs visibly, as the result of
events in the story. This renders its emotional logic understandable to your
reader. Otherwise this life-changing moment seems to occur on a whim,
disconnecting us from the protagonist and the narrative. When big shifts
occur for no apparent reason, readers lose the ability to read situations and
predict their implications—and so can no longer reliably feel hope or fear as
to their outcomes.
In your dramatic story, Holly’s dramatic poles are empathy vs. control.
Her empathy side leads her to wants to help Juliette. Her control side leads
her to want to achieve dominance over her. If at the Escalation Point of your
story Holly abruptly drops her empathetic side and spirals into the obsessive
need to control both her mother-in-law and her husband, and we don’t see
the incident that sparks that shift, we’ll lose our identification with her and
likely feel that we missed a crucial step in the narrative.
Later in the process you may find that editors, clients, or readers fail to
follow the reasons driving a dramatic turn that you intended to be
explicable. This indicates that you failed to give the events leading to the
turn, or the turn itself, sufficient emphasis.
C O I B
The conclusion may turn on a Reveal, but once escalation has begun, the
time to introduce new information in the form of Pipe and Question beats
has passed.
If you see them in your map on the wrong side of the Escalation Point,
find a way to move them to the other side of it.
That’s why there’s a briefing sequence before the Death Star attack: to
give the audience all the information they need and then get out of the way.
(Note by the way that although it follows a classic lecture format, complete
with galaxy-far-far-away PowerPoint, it does not play as emotionally inert.
It is the Reveal to a Question beat posed at the very beginning of the film—
what’s in those plans that Darth Vader wants so much? It lands as an up
beat, in which we see the plans as reward for the group’s efforts throughout
the long chase-and-rescue sequence inside the Death Star.)
C O F B
Likewise, flourish beats go by the wayside after the Escalation Point.
Gratifications and Bringdowns don’t advance the story. If you think you
need one at this late point, you have misconceived your conclusion and
need to rethink it.
Don’t stop for Commentary beats. In some modes, for example if you’re
writing in a 19th century style, you might come back to these in a
denouement or coda, but when you’re between the Escalation Point and
resolution readers have no time for editorializing. They’ll skip through it on
the page and sit in frustration during a performed piece, waiting for the
declaimer to shut the hell up.
R T
Economy has now become key, so keep the number of scene transitions to
an absolute minimum. When you do jump between scenes, make them
Outgrowths if at all possible and Meanwhiles or Continuations when not.
If you’re stuck with a Break, first rethink the events of your conclusion in
hopes of substituting a scene or scenes connected by a less jarring
transition. Given no other choice, find a stylistic note allowing you to recast
it as a Rhyme.
Flashbacks accompany information beats, which ought to be on the other
side of the Escalation Point divide. They may be the best way to convey
Reveals, but don’t leave them in without asking yourself if the beat they
transition into can be moved back. If you do leave in a Flashback, that
means you’ll also be including its outgoing counterpart, the Return. That’s
two shifts in time in the sequence that most thrives on forward momentum.
If a Flash Forward makes sense in your conclusive sequence, and you are
not following a stroke of weird genius unique to your premise, you have
probably picked the wrong series of conclusive events entirely.
The sight of a Viewpoint break in your conclusive sequence rings the
loudest alarm bell of all. If you have to jump into the perspective of a
character who has never before been the emotional focus of a scene to tell
your story, you have built yourself a Jenga tower, not a coherent narrative.
(Authors most often try to get away with this when they’ve established a
first person voice and then realize they have to hide their protagonist’s
actions from the reader during the climax—a huge cheat. Or they’ve just
remembered that they’re killing off the protagonist and need someone to
carry on the story after the dust gets bitten—also unforgivably sloppy.)
Again, two fixes present themselves:

alter the events of your conclusion so you don’t need to introduce

a new viewpoint character
or insert scenes that occur considerably before the Escalation
Point in which that character becomes the source of our
perspective and thus our hopes and fears

Both require more than surface alterations. In the second instance, be sure
that the new scenes moving that Viewpoint transition to an earlier point also
genuinely serve the narrative when they appear. Otherwise they will read as
gratuitous sidetracks that do not advance your story or invoke its
throughline or core question.

Dramatic Resolution
Resolution for dramatic protagonists takes the form of a final event that
changes them forever, doing one or more of the following:

ending their inner conflicts, moving them permanently to one or

the other of their two dramatic poles
ending the power that the unmet desire holds over them, by:
finally achieving the desire
changing conditions so that the desire can never be met
bringing about the character’s final renunciation of the
desire

Dramatic characters, particularly in tragic forms, may not survive the

resolution of their poles, or face destruction soon afterward.
In the complicated resolution of an ensemble piece, all the key players
experience a permanent change of relationship to their unmet desires and/or
dramatic poles. This may occur in a set piece scene that brings them all
together, or in a series of mini-climaxes. More often, only some of the
characters undergo full resolutions, revealing the rest as mere foils to the
true protagonists. Their scenes reflect the theme or throughline, contrasting
with the characters you find important enough to warrant wrap-up.
C C
A circular ending may look like an example of an ambiguous or unresolved
conclusion but in fact shows a protagonist resolving her dramatic poles not
just once but twice. The character begins on one side of the arc, seems to
land on the other side, but then is pulled back to the same conditions that
prevailed at the story’s beginning. This ironic conclusion befits a worldview
that sees the possibility of true internal change as an illusion. It depicts
characters trapped by deterministic social conditions or the indifferent
cruelty of fate.
A circular ending occurs in After Hours (1985) whose protagonist goes
from drab conformity to embrace of adventure back to conformity again.
Such bleak and/or ironic endings tell us that life’s great problems remain
eternal. Readers prepared either by genre expectations or by the progress of
your individual narrative savor this fatalism.
“W N ?” C
A close cousin of the ironic coda answers the question you pose at the
beginning, but then leaves the hero at a crossroads, facing a new question.
In want of a separate term to distinguish it from all the other ambiguous
endings we’ve identified, we might call this the New Question coda. The
archetypal example of this appears in The Graduate (1967), leaving Ben
and Elaine in the back seat of a bus after he has convinced her to abandon
her groom at the altar. They stare ahead, stunned, as if to ask, “What next?”
Another famous New Question coda occurs in The Candidate (1972) when
the Redford character wins election and then has no idea what that entails.
O -E P C
When you start a story and pose a question you create the expectation that
you will at the end of your story answer that question.
If you reach the end of your narrative and don’t see your dramatic
protagonist being conclusively moved to one or the other of her poles, ask
yourself what would have to happen to bring that about. Ask yourself if
those events are the ones you really ought to be writing.
Writers wishing to portray the ambiguity of life sometimes prefer to leave
their endings unresolved.
In an ambiguous or open-ended conclusion, the hero attempts to resolve
the inner conflict represented by the dramatic poles but fails to do so,
winding up just as torn between them as ever. The realization that the
tension is presently irreconcilable is itself a point of conclusion—provided
that realization occurs, to the audience if not the character.
Resolutions may be provisional or tentative when you write a realistically
drawn character’s life in installments. Although dramatic characters do not
typically recur the way iconic heroes do, some do resurface in literary
sequels. Examples include Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe character (as
first seen in The Sportswriter) and the cast of Darryl Ponicsan’s The Last
Detail, who return thirty-five years later in Last Flag Flying. Writers who
draw on their own lives may return repeatedly to the same alter ego, as
Philip Roth does with his Nathan Zuckerman character. When embarking
on a new dramatic piece starring a dramatic protagonist you’ve used before,
you’ll assign revised dramatic poles or invalidate the apparent
conclusiveness of the original ending to show the character once again torn
between his usual impulses. The act of depicting the same dramatic
protagonist multiple times bends toward a naturalistic approach, in which
internal truces and small epiphanies replace the momentous character
change of classical literature. Even a character forever caught between
dramatic poles can gain an unmet desire, lose all hope of doing so, or
choose to stop pursuing it.
W U E C
Truly unresolved endings occur when the question posed by the narrative
would naturally be answered in one way or the other, but the author cuts off
abruptly before revealing what happens.
If the main question your story poses is, “will Dragana attend her father’s
funeral?” and you end the story while she remains undecided, expect your
audience to react with frustration spurred by betrayed expectations.
Whether Dragana will go is a binary question: she either will, or won’t. You
may have a broader artistic reason for wanting to leave your audience
unsatisfied. If dissatisfaction is not your goal, resolve your story.

Transformative Resolution
The transformational hero’s resolution occurs when the hero achieves his
tactical goal. Where an adversary exists, the hero puts a definite kibosh on
the adversary plan. This victory conclusively moves the hero to the end
point of his arc.
The external benefits to society of achieving the tactical goal, and the
internal benefit of completing the arc may both be shown in the
denouement.
Most transformational hero stories function on an aspirational level. They
end on an up note, leaving viewers happy that the hero achieved the goal,
and pleased to see the character arc completed. As part of the delivery of
the hoped-for conclusion, they see the villain punished and order restored—
or a cruel order replaced by a just one.
Certain genres, most notably horror, war, satire, and noir crime drama,
admit the possibility of conclusions that fly in the face of reader aspiration.
Their heroes might still meet their tactical goals and undergo positive
transformations. However, they might just easily:

undergo a corrosive transformations, paying a price and moving

from a better to a worse state
fail to achieve the tactical goal
or both

Audiences know what they’re getting into when they choose a piece in
these genres and so are less likely to recoil from a shocking conclusion than
people primed for genres that implicitly promise happy outcomes. An anti-
aspirational romantic comedy in which the couple winds up hating one
another will arouse greater ire than a horror tale in which the hero goes
from blissful unawareness to terrible knowledge and is destroyed in the
process.

Iconic Resolution
Iconic resolution occurs when the iconic hero overcomes and conclusively
ends the disorder, through a surprising yet satisfying application of his
iconic ethos.
The adversary plan is shown to have failed, and some form of justice
likely meted out to the antagonist. Where these are not obvious, the
denouement shows the benefits of order’s restoration.
Heroes expressing a darker worldview may be shown to have paid a
personal price for again exercising their ethos. Codas to their stories may
emphasize the price of victory, depict only a partial triumph, or remind the
viewer that the hero’s work is cyclical and thus never fully complete. For
example, the antagonist might escape, leaving the hero to ruminate on the
likelihood of an even more difficult rematch.

Denouement
You may choose to end your narrative immediately after its culminating
moment. A drama with a downbeat ending will typically do this.
Alternately, you can ease the viewer out of your story with a denouement
or coda wrapping up procedural loose ends or showing the characters in
their final emotional state.
In a procedural this is where you show the rewards of achieving the
tactical goal or restoring order, reaped by the hero and/or society at large.
In puzzle narratives, like the classic murder mystery, Reveal beats may tie
up loose ends, delivering information important enough for the reader to
care about but not so important that you allowed it to consume audience
attention during your resolution.
In procedural sub-genres the denouement may add the burning spice of a
down note to an otherwise positive conclusion. We might see that the hero
cannot relax her vigilance, because it won’t be long before disorder rises
again, requiring her to once more put her iconic ethos into action.

Reviewing Your Completed Map

The process of making your map probably helped you to crystallize scenes
and sequences. Along the way you may have already spotted stretches
where the emotional rhythm veered too consistently in one direction for too
long.
Once you complete the map, you can then test it for a number of common
flaws, switching from the creative mode to the analytical. (I would say
“from right brain to left brain,” but unfortunately for easy metaphors about
the writing process, that turns out to be pop-psych hogwash.)

Trajectory
Zoom out to look at the overall line your beat map follows. This is your
trajectory.
 You may be familiar with a line of rising action and climax from high
school English classes. This measures the rising stakes of a story. Beat map
trajectories don’t look like this.
They almost always consist of a slowly downward sloping line, like these
lines for Hamlet, Casablanca, and the film version of Dr. No.
H

D .N

Does your line look like those, more or less? You’re golden. Continue to the
next step.
A nonstandard trajectory doesn’t necessarily signal a flawed structure or
unsatisfying emotional line. It might perfectly suit your intentions.
However, if that wasn’t what you were aiming for, check the bits of the
line that deviate from the norm and affirm that they result from decisions
that you made on purpose and want to stick with.
Sections that slope consistently upwards or downwards for many beats
suggest sequences that occur all on the same emotional level, either positive
or negative. Either way, the effect can prove deadening and repetitive. Take
a close look at these sections to find places where you can add the spice of
threat or disappointment to otherwise over-cheerful passages, or leavening
humor or small victories to sections that descend into a slough of despond.
Be especially wary of stretches of unvarying development, which happen
when too many lateral or crossed arrows clump together. These mark a
stagnant narrative that fails to develop, or feels to the reader that it’s taking
one step forward and one step back.
You may look at an apparent problem section and decide that there’s no
way to alter its rhythm while staying true to your vision for the piece. When
that’s the case, stick to your guns—and be ready to articulate to your editor,
producer, or other collaborators why your story follows its unconventional
path.

Testing for Aptness

Now go through the entire map from start to finish, reviewing all of your
beats to ensure that they invoke the theme and throughline. A beat that does
neither is inapt—it might belong in a story, but not this one. Check the beats
around it too, in case this one off note alerts you to the presence of an entire
sequence that has meandered away from your throughline and other core
elements.
Inapt passages can strike any writer, but are a particular hazard when
writing sans outline and then working back toward structure.
A beat that brings in your throughline and/or theme will almost invariably
also show movement toward answering your story’s core question. Though
unlikely, you might decide that a beat involves the core question without
relating particularly to theme and throughline. Ideally you can rewrite it to
do both, but might be able to get away with leaving it as it is.
When you spot an inapt beat, several choices present themselves:

If it can be lifted out of your story without affecting anything else

around it, cut it entirely. (It probably persists as the fossil of a
direction you wound up abandoning as you developed your
story.)
If a story point becomes unclear or incomprehensible without it:
rewrite the moment to bring in theme and/or throughline
write a replacement moment that fulfills the same plot
purpose while also bringing in theme or throughline

Check Pacing Issues

Clusters of non-foundation beats in certain stretches of your maps indicate
the presence of pacing problems.
S Y C
First, check your ending, from the Escalation Point onward.
From this point on, you should be doing nothing but completing your
story. Nothing that fails to advance the narrative should survive in those
rarefied waters.
If you see flourish beats, cut them.
If you see new Question or Pipe beats, reconfigure your story so you no
longer need them. All information necessary to follow your story should be
in place before the final turn.
Big Reveals often usher in the final acceleration to the climax. You may
need to sneak a few in the denouement, though in most genres this too is
best avoided. Take care, though, that they answer previously established
Questions, rather than opening up new topics of exposition. Once you’re in
the final turn any explaining the audience hasn’t already been primed to
want will reduce momentum to a wobble.
Lateral arrows in your climactic sequence also point to a deadening of
momentum. Adjust their accompanying beat so they move the dial up or
down, or remove them.
Take a hard look at any crossed arrows: they may convey the entire point
of the piece, or they could be fogging up the audience’s understanding of
the proceedings. Any such beat that achieves more of the latter than the
former needs to be firmly pointed in one direction or the other.
A Y I
Now take a similarly close look at your opener.
Is there a point at which you can say the story proper really begins?
If this occurs later than the first handful of beats, ask yourself how many
of those prefatory beats you really need.
Older stories often take a long time establishing a status quo before
disturbing it with events that threaten to launch a narrative.
Ask yourself how many beats you can remove while still establishing that
status quo and inviting the audience to either hope for, or fear, its
continuance. Then remove those beats.
You have now tightened the crucial beginning of your map, placing the
real launch point of the story as few beats after the first beat as possible.
 Now look for lateral beats, especially Pipe and Reveal beats, setting up
the information needed to follow the story, and see how many of them you
can energize by introducing a Dilemma, a situation that activates our hope
and fear (further detailed under The Dilemma).
While writing introductory sections you may be tempted to write scenes
that simply establish an element of your storyline: a character, a location, a
key detail about the workings of your world. Even the mildest sliver of a
Dilemma can activate an otherwise flat or passive moment.
Let’s say, for example, that you want to establish the pretty obvious point
that your child protagonist, who you have named Uko, loves his mother.
This becomes important when he is brutally separated from her a few beats
into the story, You could just show her cooking in the kitchen as he gazes at
her adoringly. But if it looks like she’s about to catch her sleeve on the
handle of a bubbling pot of water, the audience now has cause to fear for
her. When Uko cries out to her and she smiles and moves the handle,
avoiding disaster, our hopes have been realized. We’ve still been introduced
to Uko and his mother, and seen their relationship, but that knowledge has
been reinforced by a down beat and an up beat.

Eliminating Repetition
Perhaps worse than an inapt beat is a beat so apt that you include it more
than once. This is a particular hazard in dramatic writing, where repeated
moments don’t stand out as obviously as they do in a plot-centric piece. It’s
harder to miss the fact that you’ve already had the character find the
bloodstains behind the wallpaper in the attic than to notice that you’ve had
two characters conduct the same argument to the same conclusion more
than once.
S F D R
Scan the map looking for beats that:

feature the same characters

revolve around the same basic conflict
and resolve to the same outcome
When you find a repeated Dramatic beat, first see if you can cut it entirely.
If for some reason you need to leave it in, you probably don’t and still
should cut it entirely. However if there’s a particular bit about it you really
love, that’s totally a sign you should cut it entirely. Having been warned
three times, that scene might serve some other key purpose, in which case
you can reshape it so that it no longer registers as repetitive. Do this by:

altering the tactic the petitioner uses in attempting to persuade

the granter
increasing the severity of the consequences (the stakes) for the
petitioner if the granter does not accede to the request
having the granter rebuff the petitioner with greater emotional
force
having the granter come closer toward the petitioner emotionally
without quite granting the request

You’ve no doubt noted that the above assumes that the similar outcome of
the two beats was the rebuff of the petitioner.
That’s because you will never need to show the granter saying yes to the
same request twice. When you do find that, you’ll spot it as an error and
remove it without having to think about it.
Reviewing your dramatic piece’s map, you see that you have two separate
scenes in which Tom asks his mother to be a little nicer to his wife, to
which his mother responds by deflecting his request. You decide that it suits
the piece’s desired sense of emotional realism for him to ask twice. It
doesn’t make sense for him to give up completely after one failed try. You
could vary this in a number of ways:

1. Tom could shift tactics—this time, instead of asking

diplomatically, he can couch the request as a demand. The new
scene will play as an escalation rather than repetition.
2. A new prior scene in which Holly issues an ultimatum to Tom
before he talks to Juliette raises the stakes for him, giving it
higher stakes than the previous try.
 3. Juliette could react more vehemently to the repeated request, this
time telling Tom she thinks his marriage is doomed, and she’ll
be popping champagne when the divorce papers appear.
4. Juliette could refuse him in a more conciliatory way, saying
she’ll try but can’t make any promises, because Holly’s asking
for too much from her.

Reviewing your options, you reject 2, because it undercuts sympathy for

Holly too much at this point. Option 3 raises the same problem, but for
Juliette, so you drop that from consideration too. Although either of the
remaining two would work, you immediately start seeing some funny
exchanges for 1. That’s the one that captures your imagination, so you go
with that.
S F P R
The much rarer procedural repetition occurs when you find two beats that:

feature the same character

facing a similar obstacle
using the same method against it
to the same result

Although you might be able to drop a procedural obstacle entirely, chances

are that you’ll need to alter or substitute another beat that accomplishes the
same pacing goal.
As the above list implies, you can remove the repetition by altering any of
its elements. For added points, reconceive more than one of them.

when you have more than one protagonist, another character can
tackle the obstacle
you can introduce an entirely different obstacle
you can keep the obstacle but change the means of overcoming it
the outcome might differ
You see that through bleary oversight you put the same key beat, where the
hero overcomes a villain by destroying his metal breathing mask, in two
different places in your map.
The map has helped you to find a problem. Now to ponder a solution.
Although you can certainly swap out the breathing mask business for
something else entirely, you realize that this gives you the opportunity for a
fun reversal. The original beat has your hero badly smashing up his fist as
he pummels the mask again and again. For its reprise, you decide that he
now has a handy pair of wire cutters in his belt, which he uses to reach out
and simply snip off one of the wire bits holding the mask in place.
O R
Likewise, you’ll want to nip out identical Gratifications and Bringdowns
wherever they occur. These flourish beats don’t contain the various moving
parts that foundation beats do, so you have less leeway to vary them.
As previously mentioned, sometimes you need to mention bits of
information more than once, so repeated Questions or Reveals might still
make the cut. Mark them, however, to remind yourself to write or rewrite
them with enough variation to avoid a straight-up rehash.

Character Tracking
Now review each beat involving a character or characters to ensure that it
tracks with their poles, arc, or ethos.

Do scenes featuring key dramatic characters demonstrate their

relationship to one or both of their poles?
Do scenes featuring transformational heroes show them moving
on their arc, either forward or backward?
Do key victories of the iconic hero demonstrate her iconic ethos?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, look for ways to reconceive
the scene so that it becomes yes.
In the case of an iconic hero, you might also look for less pivotal scenes
that can be drawn closer to the point by bringing in her ethos.

Procedural Pitfalls
Look at all of your Procedural beats to find holes in your internal logic.
Do any of them need prior Pipe beats to make sense? If so, find places to
slip in that required exposition, as unobtrusively as you can.
Do certain actions of the adversaries or other supporting characters
require them to have information they shouldn’t? This question can provoke
much brow-furrowing, and the later you discover a problem of this type the
harder it is to fix. Whenever characters act on information, ask yourself how
did they know this? When they can’t know, you’ll have to change the
affected beats to make sense. Often you can think of a way for them to gain
the information, but only in a way that isn’t interesting to watch or hear
explained. Either make it simple and fascinating (perhaps by installing a
prior Pipe beat) or junk this moment in favor of one that doesn’t require
unrealistically informed antagonists.
Do they require the characters to be in places they can’t get to, given your
timeline? Again, this calls for a major rethink.
Does the plot only work if allied characters don’t share information,
which they have no believable reason to withhold? Procedural writers still
get away with this, but this contrivance grows creakier by the year. By the
time you read this every audience member might be on high alert against it.
Reconfigure this plot thread, either by adding a credible, easily understood
reason for characters to withhold vital facts from one another, or by having
them share what they know, building out new chains of consequences from
that assumption.

Predictable Moments
Audiences take in more narrative than ever before, absorbing it even as it
adapts to this exposure by taking on ever-more-complex structures and
strategies. They binge-watch TV on disc and in streaming formats, and burn
through the books in a series one after the other. Increasingly they silo their
tastes, reading everything in a tightly defined sub-genre or sub-sub-genre.
Without getting into the relative intricacies of satirical dinosaur porn vs.
regular dinosaur porn, your audience may expect certain moments to occur
in your story based on:

The genre you’re working in.

External cues, like your title, book cover, movie poster, and so
 on.
Conventional signals across fictional narratives. In film and TV,
we never see characters cough for no reason. Therefore when you
see a character cough in more than one scene, we know he has
lung cancer or tuberculosis or something just as fatal.
Inevitable consequences of previous beats. For example, if you
establish that the character has received an important letter but
refuses to open it, we can safely assume that the letter will be
opened eventually.

When you delay the introduction of an expected story moment, you leave
the audience waiting. Nothing slows down our sense of time like being
made to wait, whether in a line up at the bank or while reading a book or
watching a movie. No matter what else happens in the space between
expectation and delivery, you’ve still left your audience in a waiting room.
Review your map for key moments the audience can likely see coming
many beats ahead of the actual event. To change your narrative from the
predictable to the surprising, move the expected incident as far forward into
the story as you can, and then deal with the consequences of it happening
earlier than the audience expects.
Failing that, ensure that any predictable outcome occurs in a surprising
way, or leads in an unanticipated direction.

Apt But Unnecessary Passages

Having searched for all of these hallmarks of flat, meandering, inconsistent,
or over-familiar storytelling, take one final sweep of the beats on your map.
First, direct a hawkish eye at the new beats you’ve introduced (if any)
during this series of review stages, to make sure that none of these late-
breaking moments fail to track or introduce entirely new pitfalls or
rhythmic irregularities.
But most of all, scour the map for moments that meet all of the tests, but
still don’t need to be there, because they repeat earlier beats, or can be left
to the viewer to infer.

Thread Mapping
In a complex narrative in which the story threads into multiple plotlines,
you may wish to add customized symbols for each major plot or character.
These might appear over the main symbol for each beat. At a glance you
can then see how long your story has gone without devoting a beat to a
particular thread.
When thread mapping by plotline, choose an abstract symbol to represent
each. A sprawling saga that follows four levels of society—the poor, the
servants, the middle class, and the elite—might map as follows. Here’s a
sample excerpt of that map, in which our imaginary author has chosen a
manor for the elite, a bridge for the servants, a ruined hovel for the poor,
and a modest home for the middle class.
You might prefer a system of color coded backgrounds behind the beat
icons. You can mark intersections between threads by dividing the color
field into sections: halves where two threads intersect, thirds where three
come together, and so on. This won’t work if you or anyone else who needs
to refer to the map has trouble distinguishing colors.
As this book is not printed in color we’ll stick with image diagrams here.

A map focusing on keeping track of the cast can use images of people more
or less resembling your various characters. Here’s what an excerpt from the
larger map would look like.
Thread mapping shows you how much weight you’re giving to each
element you’re tracking. It gives you an approximation only, as some beats
occupy much more space on the page or time on screen than others.
If you discover that a thread you thought would occupy a central spot in
the narrative doesn’t appear much on your map, that may be a sign that it
doesn’t interest you as much as you thought it would, or can’t be elaborated
into an extended series of scenes. The map may be telling you that it can be
dropped in its entirety. Perhaps it can still earn its keep if folded into
another thread.
You might otherwise discover that:
A large number of scenes take place between minor characters. Find ways
to give their roles in the story to your leads. Alternately, seek entirely new
sequences that perform the same function in your story but would naturally
feature your main characters.
A subplot has expanded to take attention from your main plot. Decide
whether this has happened because:

you find the subplot more interesting than the main plot
or you lost track of your throughline and let the implications of
this rogue element carry you in an unwanted direction

In the first case, develop a version of your story in which the former subplot
now becomes the main action. Do you like that better than your original
thought? Pursue it. Does it turn out not to warrant that level of attention?
Go to the solution for the second case.
In the second case, cut this plot, leaving only those beats that make your
main plot understandable.
 A character or subplot first appears so late in the narrative that readers
are likely to resent the time you spend introducing it. Move its opening
beats, or new beats that prefigure it, to as early a point in the story as makes
sense without detracting from your current introductory sequence.
A major character goes missing from your piece for a long period of time.
Where possible, address this problem by changing the spacing between
scenes featuring the overlooked character. This might necessitate dividing
scenes up, if your story’s chronology permits. Scenes created only to
remind us that a major character exists risk seeming superfluous—because,
aside from this pacing issue, they are. If your story needed them, you would
have conceived of them before you noticed a gap on your thread map.
A character you thought of as minor drives a surprisingly large number of
beats. This may signal either a diffuse plotline in need of tightening, or a
more interesting one beginning to emerge from your current vision.
Determine why the character has seized control of your narrative. Is it
because:

your plot needs that character to set its events into motion?
that character has grown in interest and richness, eclipsing the
people you originally intended to write about?

In the first case, see how many of that character’s plot turns can be
reconceived to instead put the characters you really care about at the center
of the action. If after doing that the character that insists on upgrading
himself still drives a solid chunk of your narrative, be sure to flesh that
character out in order in order to maintain audience interest. Depending on
the type of story you’re writing, that might entail giving the character:

dramatic poles that his actions can resolve

qualities that make him a foil to your true protagonist(s)
intentions and actions that threaten the progress of the iconic
hero, making him a full-fledged antagonist

In the second case the process of writing or outlining has shown you what
you care about, and it’s this character. Likely he has already fleshed himself
out in the course of your scene building. Establish his dramatic poles,
transformational arc, or iconic ethos, and envision a new narrative in which
this character is a, or the, protagonist.
Or just kill off the pest at the earliest opportunity, like Shakespeare did in
Romeo and Juliet with that notorious scene-stealer, Mercutio. As a working
pro, he knew that sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

When to Thread Map

Thread mapping only justifies the effort when you’re writing a large cast of
characters or threading together very distinct plots and subplots. When
writing a narrative with a small number of protagonists, especially if that
number is one, thread mapping wastes your time and encourages
counterproductive overthinking.
None of this book’s four examples of beat mapping include thread maps,
as none of them warrant it.

From Map to Prose Outline

If you started with the map, you may or may not then wish to complete the
intermediate step of writing a prose outline before embarking on your first
draft.
Your working relationship with an editor, producer, or other client may
require a comprehensible prose outline before you receive approval to move
on.
Absent such necessities, you may well find it illuminating to render the
map into a condensed version of your story that hits the main points without
dialogue or extended description. Doing this may cause procedural plot
holes and off-track character moments you couldn’t see in diagram form to
stand out on the written page.
On the other hand, you might be self-publishing, writing on spec, or
otherwise have the freedom to move from graphic representation to first
draft. You may feel that you’ve done enough analysis for a while and want
to move on before you lose the elusive spark that drove you to the story in
the first place.
 6
First Draft
At this point in the process of writing your piece, you may have:

completed a beat map and a prose outline based on it

completed a beat map, and intend to skip the prose outline stage
or decided to take the seat-of-the-pants approach, writing first
and analyzing later

In the last instance, you may have jotted down some basic notes, perhaps
establishing such points of story conception (see Chapter 1) as throughline,
theme, core question, boil-down, and elements relevant to your characters,
which vary depending on whether you’re telling a dramatic or procedural
story.
Wherever you’re at in your process, this is the chapter that discusses the
actual creation of story beats on the page.

More Agnosticism, This Time on Style

Just as it sets aside issues of structure, this book does not attempt to tell you
much about style.
Stylistic assumptions vary widely not only by form, but within them.
Reader expectations for prose style fix themselves heavily to genre, from
the lit-fic tradition of density, lyricism, and experimentation to the
somewhat retro preferences of fantasy fans.
Moreover, stylistic approaches go in and out of fashion, in a way that the
foundational elements of narrative do not. A style dictum can go from rule
to guideline to point of controversy to relic over the course of a few
generations.
For beginning writers, I present a few token bullet points on style before
moving on:

Learn the prevalent styles in your chosen field by reading deeply

within it.
 Read essays on style by prominent editors in your field, and
adopt the bits that make sense, and reject the stuff that comes off
as overly hidebound. As soon as someone articulates a rule, its
salience starts to erode.
Beginning writers for reasons I only partly understand tend to
gravitate to outmoded styles, with dialogue straight out of ‘30s
movies and descriptive prose evoking the Victorian era. Shake
this unconscious tendency by reading plenty of recent work as
well as the classics.
If, because you’re trying to obey a style rule, you find yourself
writing a longer scene than you otherwise would, or taking the
long way around to make a point, discard that rule. Whoever sold
it to you cares more about superficial order than economical
storytelling.

Having said all that, I do strongly endorse one standard piece of advice
about style. Put off struggling with it until at least your second draft.
Nothing kills writing momentum during the initial creation phase than
getting stuck on a bum phrase and trying to hammer it into submission. It’s
normal and natural to rephrase your sentences as you write them. But when
one passage in particular starts kicking your ass, let it go. Come back to it
with a fresh mind on later passes through the piece, when you have the
foundations of the story in place and can focus mostly on fine-tuning your
expression. When I hit a rocky section of text, I use the highlighter function
in my word processing program of choice, to mark it out for a later grim
reckoning.
About a half of the time, it turns out that I was overthinking my way into
an unreasoning hatred of the passage in question. With refreshed
perspective it turns out to be either perfectly fine as is or can easily be fixed
with a minor tweak I just couldn’t see the first time around.
The other half requires tongs and a blowtorch.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s get back to the real
questions of the first draft stage.

Building Dramatic Scenes

Dramatic scenes almost invariably employ the same basic structure.
 1. The petitioner makes a request of the granter.
2. The granter resists the petition.
3. The petitioner presses the point, either:
adopting a different emotional tactic, allowing the scene
to continue
or repeating the same failed tactic, leading the granter to
conclusively refuse, ending the scene
4. If the scene is still continuing, the granter either:
resists again, shifting emotional tactics in response to
the petitioner’s new tactic , allowing the scene to
continue, returning to 3
or concedes, granting the petition, ending the scene in
the petitioner’s favor

Requests, especially in the early parts of a dramatic story, tend to consist of

both:

text, what the character literally asks for

and subtext, the deeper impulse for emotional reward behind the
petition

Text and Subtext

For example, when Holly wants to look at the cut on Tom’s hand, the text
is, “Hey let me take a look at that cut,” and the subtext is, “Let me put
myself in the position of caregiver, assuming power over you in a way you
can’t deny without seeming ungrateful.”
In some genres, characters make subtext into text, blatantly proclaiming
their desires. Soap operas, seeking high emotion while remaining very easy
to understand even while distracted, use this technique. Sophisticated
psychological dramas may show the characters moving past subtext into a
real discussion of their desires only in their climactic or pivotal moments.

Tactics
Emotional tactics describe the way characters appeal to others to get what
they want. They arise from the characters’ personalities, histories, and often
their dramatic poles. If you have envisioned your characters as internally
consistent beings engaging in the sort of behavior you know from life, their
tactics will come to you as you write, without having to think of them in
these analytical terms.
If you’re stumped for a likely tactic, either from the petitioner while
asking for something or the granter for refusing it, you may be bending your
characters into a dramatic conflict even though it makes no sense based on
what you’ve established. In other words, you’re contriving their situation
and writing a scene you should abandon in favor of an alternative that better
fits your piece’s inner logic.
In rare cases, the conflict might make perfect sense. However, you’re
temporarily unable to see how your characters ought to express it without
repeating themselves, as we mostly do in real life arguments. You’ll almost
always find it best to leave a placeholder in the text for now and wait till
your idling brain solves the problem for you. But if you need an idea now,
dammit, a look at a list of emotional tactics inspire your character’s next
move:

bargaining
browbeating
bullying
citing authority
debating
deflecting
delaying
demoralizing
distracting
embracing
jollying
placating
playing dumb
pleading
 reassuring
scolding
soothing
threatening

Hitting the Poles

For strongest impact in dramatic exchanges, have your characters use
tactics that exploit or arise from protagonists’ dramatic poles.
When you want characters to believably accept petitions the audience
wants or expects them to reject, depict the petitioner making an appeal to
the very core of the granter—to the granter’s dramatic poles.
If a character’s poles have already been established as freedom vs.
responsibility, the audience might not want him to agree to stay home and
protect the ungrateful townsfolk instead of going off to enjoy his life. But
when the wise grandmother convinces him to remain by appealing to his
responsibility, we understand why, and accept it as a credible choice, if not
desirable.
Often a character’s dramatic poles consist of a strong state and a
vulnerable one. When we care about a protagonist, we take it especially
hard to see the vulnerable state brought to the fore or taken advantage of.
When a character whose poles are genius vs. self-doubt receives a
dressing down from a forbidding loved one and crumbles emotionally, that
down arrow hits with enhanced impact. The character has suffered not just
any old emotional setback, but the one we have been most primed to fear.

What Is That In Beats?

A dramatic scene can be marked as consisting of one, two, or many beats,
depending on how thinly you choose to slice them. To avoid cluttering the
map, I rarely see any practical reason to note them as anything other than a
single beat, with the outgoing arrows showing whether the viewer is likely
to take heart from the outcome, or react with anxiety.
Theoretically, though, each scene consists of two moments:

the petitioner makes the pitch

the granter rebuffs or accepts
If we sympathize more with the granter than the petitioner, we feel anxiety
in the first moment, as we worry that the granter might give in. If we
sympathize with the petitioner but assume the granter will rebuff, we
likewise feel fear for our focus character.
On the other hand, if we sympathize with the petitioner and think the pitch
likely to succeed, we feel hope. The second half works as an up note if we
sympathize with the petitioner and the petition is granted or we sympathize
with the granter, the petition is refused, and we think it unlikely that the
granter will suffer an ill consequence as a result. Failing that, it registers as
a down note.
This breakdown of one beat into two increases rigor but is probably of
little practical use to the writer. You may feel that with key dramatic scenes
you want to notate both of the two key beats, to fully capture the emotional
direction of a pivotal moment.
You might find it revealing to occasionally map every shift in emotion in
a key dramatic scene, for example if a satisfying version of the scene eludes
you on the page. An example of this fine-grained analysis, looking at a
scene from Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, appears in Chapter 11.

Building Procedural Obstacles

When a procedural scene, in which a character confronts an external
obstacle, gives you trouble, you might check to see that it contains the basic
components typical of such moments.

1. the hero takes note of the obstacle

2. we see why it should be hard to overcome
3. we see the likely consequences if it is not overcome
4. [optional] the hero, or a foil character, tries to defeat the obstacle
in an obvious or foolish way, and fails
5. the hero:
solves the problem in a surprising or otherwise
gratifying way, ending the beat on an up note
or fails to solve the problem, ending the beat on a down
note and leading to a negative consequence
As with Dramatic beats above, you can slice each obstacle into many beats
if that assists your process. (Spoiler: it probably doesn’t.) Steps 1, 2, and 3
combine to form an introductory down beat, as we worry for the ill
consequences that come with failure. Step 4, which you generally only want
to use if you intend for the hero to succeed, and should ration carefully
throughout your narrative, extends the suspense with another down beat. In
Step 5, you end on either an up note if the hero succeeds, or a down note if
the hero fails.
The surprising or gratifying success may also function as the Reveal of a
previous bit of Pipe, if you previously set up the nature of the surprise. In a
classic example, the spy might use the piece of gadgetry he was previously
supplied with and briefed on, but in an inventive and unexpected way.
As someone steeped in whatever procedural genre you’ve decided to
tackle, you will hardly ever need to start with a structural breakdown like
this. Relevant obstacles will arise mostly full-blown. But if the execution of
a particular obstacle seems lackluster, you can check the structure to see
which step could use greater emphasis or a fresher angle.
An example might go like this:

1. The horror that haunts the gated community pursues our hero,
Diana Chu. She sees and hears it as it chases her across a
deserted playground.
2. The thing is gigantic, amorphous, and gnashes its slavering jaws.
On a physical level, it clearly outmatches Diana.
3. We don’t need dialogue or description to imagine that it will
dismember her, as it did the security guard, if it catches her.
4. Diana tries to speed off on her skateboard along a bench, but she
hits a device installed on it to thwart skaters (fitting the theme of
an over-concerned, controlling community unwittingly breeding
a monster) and goes flying.
5. Landing on her back, she has a flash of inspiration as the
creature nears. She coos to it like she would an adorable dog:
“Who’s a good boy, huh? You’re a good boy.” Having
previously figured out that the creature incarnates the
community’s exaggerated fear of outsiders, Diana decides to
react to it without fear.
 6. Yelping in confusion, the creature appears to dwindle. It turns
and runs off.

This counts as an up note for Diana, who we did not want to see eaten by
the monster of the week. But now she has a new problem: how does she get
rid of a monster without showing aggression toward it?
Some procedural scenes, those depicting fights for example, present the
viewer with dozens if not hundreds of back-and-forth moments of hope and
fear. Every punch thrown in a fistfight could theoretically be mapped as an
up or down beat. I can see no benefit from actually doing that. Unless
there’s a fight choreographer in your life you’d like to annoy and confuse.

The Dilemma
Once enmeshed in the writing process you will find that some scenes yield
to you instinctively. Their function speaks clearly to you, and you are able
to execute them as desired and move on.
That’s a good day.
And a situation that requires no help from a writing guide.
What you do want advice on are the scenes that seemed captivating or
necessary when you first conceived of them yet utterly elude you when it
comes time to move from premise to text.
Maybe you’re writing well but feel that you’re doing poorly, because
you’re tired or distracted.
Perhaps the scene as conceived completely justifies itself as an apt and
necessary part of your narrative, but you’ve lost track of why and therefore
can’t see how to crack it.
Or maybe the scene is misconceived and either needs to be reconfigured
from the ground up, or discarded entirely.
Find out which of these conditions applies by identifying the scene’s
Dilemma.
The Dilemma restates, for your reference, what you expect the reader to
fear for and hope for. For added punch, write it in the first person.

I fear that the creature will grab Diana, and hope that she gets
away.
I fear that Tom will say something to Holly that he can’t take
 back, and hope they make peace with one another.
I hope that Major Kong fails to open the bomb bay doors, and
fear that he will succeed.
I fear that Llewyn’s neediness and jealousy will lead him to
humiliate himself, and hope that he keeps his cool.

Ambiguous beats are marked by contradictory hopes.

I fear that Lady Macbeth has succumbed irrevocably to madness,

and hope that she recovers—yet also, paradoxically, wonder if
this might be a fitting punishment.
I hope that Morris doesn’t break Catherine’s heart, but fear he
will reconcile with her, dragging out their doomed marriage even
further.

Testing the Dilemma For Aptness

The most likely problem with the scene is that you aren’t writing your way
quickly and clearly enough to the heart of the Dilemma.
Before you address, that, though, check to see that it doesn’t have a worse
issue instead.
It may be failing you because it doesn’t fit the broader sweep of your
narrative. Ask yourself how its Dilemma relates to your:

throughline
core question
boil-down
source of disorder (iconic hero story)
transformational arc (transformational hero story)
dramatic poles (dramatic narrative)

If you can’t clearly and immediately answer these questions, your inability
to crack the scene showed your instincts working as desired, identifying a
scene that never belonged in your story in the first place.
 Now ask what would happen to the shape of your story if you cut it. Are
there any other beats on your map that won’t make literal or emotional
sense without it?
When that is the case, you’ll need to conceive a fresh scene that does pass
the aptness test while also delivering those necessary moments.
If no, snip out the whole thing. Alter your beat map (if you have one at
this stage) accordingly, noting the new transitions and changes in emotional
rhythm that result when the scene disappears.

Cutting to the Dilemma

Now that you have a scene that you’re sure passes the aptness test, for
which you have crystallized its Dilemma, take another run at the scene from
the top.
Set the previous version aside in another file for the moment; you can
paste the strong bits back in as you need them. But be careful not to veer
away from your Dilemma in order to preserve a phrase or exchange just
because it beguiles you in isolation.
Now ask yourself: what is the absolute latest point in this scene I can start
it, while:

still clearly presenting the Dilemma

and avoiding distracting and irrelevant questions on the part of
the viewer

Emerging writers tend to overdo the introductory passages of scenes, giving

valuable real estate over to travel details, social pleasantries, location
description, logistical behavior, and other bits of padding.
You need a little of that transitional material to put the scene in context,
but less than you probably think. And it’s easier to add that stuff later if you
need more of it than it is to cut it out if you wrote too much, because you
may have woven an important introductory bit into the cushioning.

Resolving the Question

Having presented the Dilemma, you then show it working out, using either
the dramatic or procedural scene structures given above.
Once the Dilemma has been resolved one way or the other, and the reader
delivered into a state of hope or fear, you again want to cut the fat and get
out of Dodge as quickly as you can.
In some cases, you might choose to cut to a new scene before the
resolution even occurs, leaving the question of whether Tom forgives Holly
or Diana finds an ally on the other side of the door as a cliffhanger to come
back to later. (Scenes that cut before resolution pose an unanswered
question and therefore always work as down beats.)
 7
Revision
The revision routines of celebrated writers range from nonexistent to
obsessive. Most of us aim for something in between. An over-revised
manuscript can lose its energy and focus. An under-revised manuscript
reveals slapdash conception and execution and is likely full of erroneusms.
In short, this is where the hard, detailed work comes in.
Assuming you find the beat analysis system useful to your process, you’ll
still be referring to it as you dig in, especially as a diagnostic tool when
scenes fail to achieve the life you intended for them. However, you’ll be
using concepts already introduced in the previous chapters of this book,
rather than any new ones specific to your first or later revision rounds.
Whether you:

mapped first, then wrote a first draft…

mapped, wrote an outline and then a first draft…
or wrote a first draft and then constructed your beat map…

...you are now at the stage every writing guide tells you matters most of all,
the revision stage.
Seat-of-the-pantsers, you’ve now discovered, having written it, what your
story was really about. This is where you start to rip out all the stuff that
your beat mapping identified as inapt. Along the way you’ll find more
sections that don’t fit, and remove those as well. Having done that, you’ll
look into reordering your material, and write whatever new apt sequences
your story needs to make sense and realize its throughline.
Mappers and outliners, this is where you test original vision against
written result, making sure the moments play the way you thought they
would. You too might discover that a more compelling iteration of your
story, perhaps with a different throughline or core question than you
originally planned, requires you to shuck off the remaining elements of the
original conception and further refine it to its new state.
The Troubles You’ll Be Shooting At
As you read your manuscript in its totality for the first time, you may find a
number of issues:

dramatic scenes in which the characterization doesn’t track,

where your characters abandon their dramatic poles and meander
about forgetting their desires and unmet needs
procedural scenes in which the adversary plan makes no sense,
depending (to name a few examples) on:
coincidence or unlikely chance
unrealistically idiotic behavior on the part of characters
who ought to be smart
knowledge they shouldn’t have
mismatched information beats, such as:
Questions without accompanying Reveals, which either
require you to:
cut the Question beat, because it’s irrelevant
or add the Reveal you forgot to include
Reveals that come out of nowhere, requiring:
an earlier Pipe beat so they don’t betray
expectations
or an earlier Question beat so they satisfy an
already whetted curiosity
dead or listless scenes without clear Dilemmas
scenes with too much cushioning before they get to the Dilemma
(less frequently) scenes that cut to the Dilemma without first
orienting the reader
stylistic infelicities, including but not limited to:
use of clichés and commonplace expressions
awkward or unclear passages
in period pieces, anachronistic expressions
over-reliance on energy-killing constructions such as:
the passive voice (“He was told not to go
 there.”)
inactive verbs (“John was raking the leaves”
which can usually become “John raked the
leaves.”)
the past perfect tense (“She had been thinking
about that for a while.”)
flat-out errors such as typos, misspellings, and
grammatical errors
and a host of other issues specific to your genre or unique to your
piece in particular

Getting the Sweep

You may prefer to read your entire manuscript before touching it, or to deal
with the most obvious errors as you conduct that first sweep. But a full first
read tells you whether the promise of all of those beats fulfills itself as the
piece you were shooting for, so don’t lose that crucial perspective by letting
yourself get sucked into too much repair work right away. You’ll go text-
blind soon enough, so don’t accelerate that process. Mark anything that
needs more than a few keystrokes of attention with the highlight function
and try as much as possible to perceive your own piece as your ideal reader
would.

Back to the Map

If you wrote from a mapped outline you undoubtedly found many beats to
change along the way. Unless you derive a heady dopamine rush from
interacting with charts and graphs, you’ll find little reason to revise the map
to match your changes.
You may find that one of your unmapped passages has a problem you
want to diagnose, in which case you might want to remap that as an aid to
thinking your way through it.
 8
Editing and Giving Notes
Beat mapping can aid you in commenting meaningfully on pieces written
by others, either as an editor or collaborator, or anyone else invited to give
notes on a narrative work. The process allows you to identify:

what the writer is trying to do

(if you commissioned the work) whether that matches your needs
or needs to be changed
whether your suggestions for story points in fact relate to its core
elements
what are the technical reasons behind wobbly, unclear, or less
than energetic passages

Facilitator or Client?
This section addresses two distinct relationships you may have to the writer
and her work. You might be acting as facilitator or client.
When acting as a facilitator, you are working to help the writer hone the
piece to best meet her intentions for it. Most often you’ll be advising the
writer on ways to pare away parts that don’t square with its original core
elements. Sometimes the author will be seeking a path to a new set of core
elements that have emerged during the writing and revision process.
As a client, you commissioned the work to meet a set of specifications—
or, more likely, you belong to a team jointly responsible for commissioning
and shaping the work. You may identify the writer’s intentions as entirely in
keeping with your needs. Perhaps the team discussed the core elements
during the original conception process, and the writer stuck to them through
writing and revision. Perhaps you are coming to the work fresh and
appreciate the writer’s take on it. On the other hand, you might discover,
using the steps outlined here, that the core elements require adjustment,
triggering a page one rewrite. You may question the choice of throughline,
core question, and all the choices that flow from that. You might have
expected the character to be portrayed as an iconic hero instead of a
transformational one, or vice versa. Perhaps you consider a dramatic hero’s
unmet desires a less than compelling driver for a narrative, or the
character’s poles to be overly familiar. The writer might have diverged from
the plan. Or maybe the fully realized piece reveals unexpected flaws in the
foundations everyone liked during the discussion phase.
While your core vision and that of the writer continue to match, you make
contributions just as a facilitator would, giving suggestions to keep the
piece’s sequences, scenes, and beats in alignment with the core elements.

And Now For the Caveats

Before you turn insights gained from beat analysis into notes, I feel an
obligation as a writer to issue a couple of warnings.
First, beware of the tendency to treat the descriptive as proscriptive, of
guidelines to turn into rules. Beat analysis describes the workings of
narrative through the lens of my analysis. The many other bits of advice
given in this book arise from general tendencies—what mostly works in
stories, more often than not. A passage that defies any tendency laid out
here, and draws you in all the same, isn’t doing it wrong and doesn’t need to
be bashed into conventional shape. Brilliance in art lies in the creator’s
ability to bend, suspend, invert, and even remake the rules. If something
ain’t broke, don’t use the beat system—or any other system—to “fix” it.
The principles of storytelling seem eternal until suddenly they’re not.
Particularly within the narrow bounds of structures created for specific
forms, demands change as audience expectations and attention spans alter.
A danger with books on writing is that the current structures they identify
get treated as absolutes to which all works must conform.
For example, Syd Field’s Screenplay described a three-act classical
structure that its author observed might be on the way out, in favor of a
linked series of set pieces as seen in various films of Stanley Kubrick. The
influence of that book led script readers to treat the three-act setup as a must
for commercial storytelling, rather than one commonly used framework
with its particular strengths and weaknesses. What was meant to be an item
in the screenwriter’s toolkit became a target everyone was expected to hit.
Which is to say that I publish the beat system for writers with some
degree of trepidation, because it too is meant as a toolkit, a set of exercises
and diagnostic tests, not as a new stone tablet with incised do’s and don’ts
to impose on the writer.
Thus the second point: as an outside voice, be sure to translate any advice
from beat system jargon back into plain English. Unless you know that the
recipient is also familiar with this book, don’t confound the writer with
Procedural beats and Gratifications and Continuation transitions and all the
rest. I can’t imagine a more demoralizing and daunting set of notes to
receive—or, introduction to this book, for that matter.

Getting Started
Read the piece in full at least once before allowing any beat analysis
thoughts to percolate. In a well-constructed piece, the reasons for certain
beats, especially those in the early going, might not become apparent until
you reach the resolution. Your first read-through is the only chance you’ll
get to come to a piece as readers will. Don’t squander that by getting
analytical right away. You may be unable to resist highlighting the odd typo
or anachronism, but try as much as you can to respond without your editor,
commenter, or collaborator hat on. Once you dive into analysis mode you
may find it hard to remember your original responses to its characters,
scenes, and emotional notes.
Having come to terms with the story as an audience member, you can start
looking under the hood to see why it works the way it does. From there, you
can:

as a facilitator, look for adjustments that might strengthen the

author’s expression of its core intention
as a client, ask yourself if the conception meets your needs
if the answer is yes, act as a facilitator
if the answer is no, figure out what your real needs are
(jointly with the rest of your team if that applies) and
articulate them

Identifying the Groundwork

Before focusing on beats, determine the core elements that make up the
piece’s groundwork: its throughline, core question, and boil-down, along
with its protagonists’ driving factors (dramatic poles, transformational arc,
or iconic ethos).
Use the Inspiration to Premise Worksheet (see Appendix 1: Inspiration to
Premise Worksheet) to jot down entries for the story’s applicable elements.
In a dramatic story, also identify the main characters’ unmet needs.
In a procedural, where an adversary plan exists, write an encapsulation of
it to see a) if you understand it and b) whether it follows a clear internal
logic.
When you find that a story could use refinement but can’t pinpoint these
elements, engage with the writer to try to bring them into clearer focus.
In a client situation, you may have participated in the work’s initial
brainstorming. In this case, you can use your recollection of that process to
shortcut your way to these answers. Before jotting anything down, be sure
that the piece as written still hews to what was decided in those early
spitballing sessions. You might discover better ways to crystallize those
basic concepts having read the original piece—either because they are now
clearer, or because the writer found and followed a fruitful new direction.
Identifying the groundwork allows you to perform the final analytical
steps after you complete your beat map.
When you are broadly commenting on a work, as opposed to digging in
beat by beat to fine-tune the work in detail, a full mapping process will
almost certainly prove unnecessary. A middle ground approach might find
you mapping only passages of the story whose virtues and flaws elude you.

Mapping the Writer’s Beats

To perform this exercise you’ll be doing exactly what I did in laying out the
examples in this book: taking an existing story one major moment at a time
and expressing it as a full beat map. This intensive process can potentially
teach you more about the story than even the author knows. It will help you
to discover what does and doesn’t engage you, and why.
Follow the steps given in “Mapping Your Story” (see Mapping Your
Story.)
Pay particular attention to the Opener: how ruthlessly does it cut to the
heart of the story? Does it start by posing its core question, however
obliquely?
As with the writer’s version of this process, how thickly you want to slice
your beats depends on your need to engage with the nitty-gritty. What
counts as a major moment in a particular text will always differ from one
mapper to the next.
For each beat you find noteworthy:

1. Identify its beat type. For ease of reference, these are:

foundation beats
Dramatic
Procedural
information beats
Pipe
Question
Reveal
flourish beats
Gratification
Bringdown
Commentary
2. Write an identifying phrase, summing up the beat in a few
words.
3. Note the beat’s emotional impact with an outgoing arrow.
up
down
crossed
lateral
4. If this is the last beat in a scene, identify its transition to the next
beat.
Outgrowth
Continuation
Break
Viewpoint
Rhyme
Meanwhile
Flashback
 Return
Flash Forward

Using the Map

When you have mapped the portion of the narrative you have chosen to
look at, circle the beats or sequences of beats that struck you while reading
as being trouble spots. Then go back to each in detail. You will usually find
that they fall into one of the categories of problem listed on the left hand
column of the table below.
T S T S
I F

Scene lacks an evident Dilemma

Cut scene, moving any required elements
elsewhere
Find a Dilemma to invite audience hope and
fear

Scene’s procedural obstacle has little evident bearing on the transformational arc
or adversary plan (in a transformational hero story), or little evident bearing on
Tie obstacle to core element
the iconic ethos or source of disorder (in an iconic hero story)
Envision new obstacle tied to core element

Characterization in dramatic scene lacks a clear relation to a protagonist’s

dramatic poles and/or unmet desires
Reframe scene for clearer relation to poles
and/or unmet desires

Procedural plot development reveals a logic flaw in adversary plan

Rethink adversary plan, finding a simple way
to close the plot hole that decreases the
complexity of the plan

Procedural plot development turns on character(s) making implausibly foolish

choice
Reconfigure plot so characters behave
intelligently based on the information they
have
Reconfigure plot to give character(s) credible,
emotional, sympathetic reason for making a
mistake

Procedural antagonist acts with knowledge he shouldn’t logically have

Where you can’t simply and elegantly explain
why antagonist knows this, rethink plan to
reflect only info he ought to have

Adversary plan otherwise lacks internal logic

 Restate plan in simplest possible terms,
finding and replacing plot holes

Reveal beats contain unclear information

Without adding lifeless, Dilemma-free Reveal
beats, clarify questionable plot points
Simplify plotting so that information is no
longer needed

Information beats end in lateral arrows, rendering them boring and static
Invest audience emotionally in receiving the
information by establishing a prior Question
beat, so we are already anxious for the
accompanying Reveal
Invest audience emotionally in receiving the
information by making a protagonist work for
it, so we receive the Reveal beat as an
emotional reward

Scene starts too early, with unneeded introductory passages

Cut out all the stuff at the beginning that
doesn’t set up the Dilemma

Piece lacks momentum

Find scenes in which characters are not
pursuing their unmet desires or tactical goals
and excise them
Look for ways to replace Break and
Continuation transitions with Outgrowths, and
where not possible, try to replace with Rhyme
transitions

What You Really Mean When You Give

Frustrating Notes
Certain common notes arise from genuine problems in a story but lead to
sidetracking discussion or, worse, the incorporation of fixes that are worse
than the problem.
When you want to say…
“The character isn’t likeable enough.” / “The character needs to be more
relatable.”
…What you probably mean is:
“The scenes as written don’t make me want to see him achieve his unmet
desire.” (Or “...complete his transformational arc.”)
A well-wrought narrative can seduce us into rooting for utterly monstrous
characters, provided that we:

comprehend their desires (even if we might not share them)

or feel some vicarious pleasure in their darkness

We can also root for an anti-hero to triumph, then let ourselves off the hook
by accepting their comeuppance at the end. Along the way we can feel
conflicted, both fearing and hoping that the supposedly unsympathetic
character will get what he wants.
We might in fact like anti-heroes more than we do paragons of virtue. We
don’t need to see characters doing altruistic things in order to care about
what happens to them.
When you want to say…
“I don’t want to spend time with this character.”
…What you probably mean is:
“This character is boring me by not taking action that moves the story
forward.”
Characters without clear direction, who don’t forward the plot, cause us to
disengage faster than any destructive anti-hero. After the writer engages us
with a character’s needs, we want to see that character do something about
them. Protagonists must make the story happen. If they’re not doing enough
to move the dial, we pull away.
Sometimes the character is taking action, but never action that succeeds,
or that we expect to see succeed when we see it attempted. For example,
when a character always chooses tactics for his petitions that can’t possibly
work on their granters, or rebuffs every petition he could grant, that
character registers as unpleasant, because he’s either failing to move the
story, or actively blocking its progression. The writer can address this by
rethinking the character’s tactics in dramatic scenes—not to make the
character nicer or more conventionally likeable, but to show that he has the
emotional savvy necessary to occasionally win people over. That happens to
be more likeable, and often nicer, but when it comes to storytelling those
qualities are insufficient.
When you want to say…
“We need to know more about this character.”
…What you probably mean is:
“The character’s goal isn’t clear enough.”
Character is action, not backstory. A scene in which we learn more about
a character’s past, unless it moves the emotional arrow up or down, stops a
story cold. Prose fiction gives us more space to bring a character’s relevant
past to bear on scenes occurring in the present than do the stripped-down,
linear formats of the stage, screen, and comic book. Rather than asking a
writer to add static, explanatory scenes to a piece, what you really want is
immediate identification with the character’s unmet desire, or incipient
transformation, or compulsion to rectify disorder, as it relates to the main
action. When a character puzzles you, it’s not because you need to know
where he went to school or how many siblings he had or the incident that
scared him most as a child. It’s because you can’t quite work out why he’s
doing what he’s doing, and without that you lose the ability to see the
consequences of their success or failure. And without that predictive ability,
you don’t know what to hope for or fear.
When information about the character will land with emotional impact, it
will naturally become part of the scene. It can inform our understanding
with, and attachment to, a protagonist’s goals. Absent that, it belongs in the
subtext or the writer’s notes, but not in the text.

Making Requests That Stick

When you’re facilitating an author’s vision, you can make your case about
any given story point but aren’t looking to impose your creativity onto it.
The author will take the notes she finds pertinent and disregard the rest.
You’re lending support, not scoring points.
Conversely, a team commissioning work from a writer needs to shape it to
their needs, and can expect to issue directives and have them followed.
However, if you can’t sell your requests to the writer, his grudging
execution will make itself apparent in the revised work. In the worst-case
scenario, they can burn out your collaborative relationship with the writer
you’re trying to direct.
You may be a writer yourself and know all this stuff already.
If not, journey with me into the dark and cavernous consciousness of the
writer, to find its secretive ways.
Writers can most easily make simple and cosmetic changes that do not
affect plot or core elements.
 This book mostly doesn’t deal with that surface stuff.
The second easiest change to make is one that fits the already established
core elements: throughline, core question, boil-down, and character drivers
(dramatic poles, transformational arc, or iconic ethos).
Before making a change request, ask yourself how it could fit one or more
of these.
If you can’t see how, expect your note to be received as an out-of-left-
field request that offers no apparent means of fulfillment.
Maybe you’re just asking for a scene with a giant spider, in a piece that
can easily be reconfigured to replace the animated statue fight with a giant
spider battle. In a loosely plotted procedural that sort of superficial
adjustment might not be so difficult to implement.
But if you look at your beat map and see mostly Outgrowth transitions,
you’re looking at a tightly plotted narrative, in which each incident arises as
the seamless consequence of the next. Changing one obstacle could pull the
whole web of cause and effect to bits. How much did you say you wanted
that spider?
For deeper issues, seek a connection between your proposed change and
the core elements, but do not provide the solution to the writer. Your job is
mostly to identify problems rather than to propose specific fixes. But when
the writer finds your request baffling, you can then point out the possible
solution you had in mind. He might use this verbatim but will more likely
go away and come up with a better way to solve the problem that goes even
more directly to the core elements.
Some notes really do come from outside the concerns of the piece. For
example, work tied in to an established property has to adhere to an
established tone or continuity, and fit the broader framework of other works
in the same line, series, or universe. You might have to tell the author that
he can’t refer to a “short sword” because that term doesn’t exist in the game
the work bases itself on, that a particular villain will have to be replaced
because the one the author proposed is super-dead (not just comic-book
dead) in the setting, or that a particular plot turn will remind readers too
much of another coming episode by another writer. These all go with the
territory when a writer works for hire, though of course you can couch these
requests, especially the niggling ones, to soften any frustration they may
trigger.
Classroom Use
Although this book addresses itself to writers, beat analysis could also be
used as tool for critics.
Modern criticism generally divorces itself from the concerns of fiction
practitioners, with their focus on craft and execution. It focuses instead on
the wider philosophical or sociopolitical implications of the work being
studied.
Even so, the process of breaking down the work’s emotional rhythm may
provide insight into those implications, just as the mapping of a manuscript
in progress might expose a new direction for the writer’s revisions.
Identifying a story’s throughline, the dramatic poles of its key
protagonists, and the tactics of its characters during emotional scenes, may
prove especially helpful in unlocking a work’s broader meaning. That might
assist a student as groundwork before embarking on an essay, for example.
If you are that student, I’d avoid explicitly using this book’s particular use
of jargon terms on your instructor. Unless, that is, she’s the one who
introduced you to them. (Hamlet’s Hit Points appears on a syllabus or two,
so stranger things have happened.)
A more complete treatment of beat analysis as it pertains to the academic
study of literature would demand a book of its own, written by someone
other than me.
If you’re an instructor making use of this book in your classroom, contact
Gameplaywright to let us know.
 9
Beat Analysis:
“Have a Seat, Shut the Door”
(from Mad Men)
Mapping out “The Necklace” (see Our First Example) illustrated beat
analysis at its most basic. Now for some more complex examples.
You can perform beat analysis on a work of any scope. To keep this book
at a reasonable length I’m going to sidestep movies and novels and tackle
nothing longer than a television episode. Let’s start with a primarily
dramatic work with a sub-thread of Procedural beats.
One of the most memorable episodes of Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men
occurs at the end of its third season. “Have a Seat, Shut the Door” sets up
the show for a fourth-season reinvention by dynamiting two of its bedrock
elements—its protagonist’s marriage and his workplace. Here’s how it
modulates its emotional rhythm as it shows Don Draper simultaneously
suffering a great victory and a sad defeat.
The episode, written by Weiner and Erin Levy, opens as our dramatic
protagonist, brilliant and mercurial ad executive Don Draper, wakes up
bleary and disoriented, to fumble with his travel alarm.
But as Don struggles for consciousness, let’s back up and identify the
show’s core elements.
Although the characters occasionally grapple with procedural obstacles,
chiefly arising from the challenges of running a successful advertising
agency, it is first and foremost a dramatic work. If you look at the breadth
of the series, you’ll see that Don Draper’s dramatic poles are authentic man
vs. fraud.
The series’ throughline can be summed up as “the quest for personal
authenticity in rapidly changing times.” Rewritten for a touch more
specificity, that becomes its boil-down: “An ad executive, his family, and
his colleagues struggle to realize their authentic selves as the ‘50s crumble
and give way to the ‘60s.”
 1) Don spends much of the series, up until its very final
beats, deeply lost. So it’s no surprise that this key
episode shows him in the disoriented state of early
waking. (Starting a piece with the character waking up
is a wildly overused device, one I’d urge emerging
writers to avoid like the plague. Its apt use here shows
that you can get away with ringing familiar bells if you both tie the moment
directly to the throughline and have also already adroitly locked down the
trust of your audience.) As Don tries to remember where and perhaps who
he is, Jon Hamm’s performance reminds us of his perennial “Who am I?
Where am I?” identity crisis. This evocation of his inner conflict counts as
an interior Dramatic beat. His sense of distress when he sees what time it is
induces audience anxiety—so we start the episode on a down note.

2) A cut takes us to a new scene, jumping to a hotel

room meeting between Don and Conrad Hilton, a
wealthy client Don has been courting for much of the
season. The new scene features Don and, as this is the
meeting he was late for in the last scene, shows him
pursuing the same goal, making the transition a Continuation. (He doesn’t
wind up at the meeting because he woke up late, so it’s not really an
Outgrowth. In this case the distinction between the two is a fine one and
doesn’t much matter.) Don has arrived late, but Hilton assures him that this
is not a problem. In dramatic scene structure parlance, he petitions for
forgiveness and Hilton grants it without hesitation. This relieves the worry
we might have felt for him over the previous delayed wake-up beat.

3) But then Connie, as Don has become accustomed to

calling him, announces some bad news. He has
discovered that the enormous (real-life) ad firm
McCann Erickson is buying Puttnam, Powell and
Lowe, the company that in turn owns Sterling Cooper,
where Don works. Hilton won’t work with McCann, which now means he
can’t work with Don. The buyout news is a matter of external practicality,
so this lands as the first of the episode’s Procedural beats, revolving around
the fate of Sterling Cooper. We take this as bad news, so it strikes a down
note.

4) Previous episodes have already well-established

Don’s lack of interest in working for McCann. He
believes it will rob him of his autonomy—and, by
implication, his authenticity. Seeing his reaction,
Hilton seeks to reassure him, telling him he’ll do well
under the new regime. Don rebuffs his petition. This
outcome leaves both men unhappy, and registers as a down note.

5) His autonomy threatened, Don worsens the

situation, lashing out at Hilton. This tactic seeks
contrition from the older, richer man, but Don lacks the
standing with him to put him on the defensive. Connie
shuts him down hard, asking Don if he’s a cryer and a
complainer. Now Don isn’t just unhappy—he’s just
been out-dominated. Another down arrow.

6) We cut to Don arriving at the Sterling Cooper office.

Although nothing happens right away to signal that this
happens as a result of the previous beat, we are still
following Don, making this transition a Continuation.
Don uneasily surveys his soon-to-be-destroyed
domain. His look of concern scores yet another down
beat.

7) A Flashback transition ensues, as we jump back in

time to watch Don before he became Don, as the child
Dick Whitman. He watches his father burn business
bridges of his own, stubbornly going it alone, breaking
with a farming cooperative, to the ill regard of his
neighbors. In his impotent rage and potentially
destructive hunger for autonomy, we see an echo of Don’s impulsive flare-
up against Hilton. We perceive the action through Dick’s perspective and
share his dismay—another down note.
8) A Return transition cuts us back to the present. Don
tells Bert Cooper, the firm’s eccentric senior eminence,
about the buyout. Don petitions him for help in
fighting back, but the old man rebuffs him on various
fronts. That makes six down arrows in a row, which is
a long time to spend going in the same direction. This
large slide underlines the severity of the crisis—this isn’t just any bad day at
Sterling Cooper, but one of significant import.

9) Don shifts tactics, successfully goading Bert, who

pivots to start plotting the elements they’d need to
extricate themselves from the buyout. Finally, an
accepted petition, and the up note that goes with it.

10) As a consequence of their

accord in the previous scene, an Outgrowth transition
takes us to the office of sardonic accounts man Roger
Sterling. Bert and Don tell Roger about the coming
sale, but Roger, more interested in making Don squirm
for recent shows of disrespect, wants him to beg for his cooperation. After
one up arrow, we’re headed back down again.

11) Bert takes over as petitioner, arguing that Roger

will languish in retirement. The show has already well
established Roger’s fear of obsolescence: his dramatic
poles might be expressed as man of the present vs. man
of the past. Although he puts up some resistance, this
appeal to one side of his conflicted nature ultimately
brings him around. An accepted petition in favor of something we want to
happen registers as an up arrow.

12) The next scene shift still features Don, but not in pursuit of the same
goal, so the transition counts as a Turn. We cut to the other shoe dropping as
Don’s wife, Betty (January Jones) tells him she’s she made an appointment
with divorce attorney. Don deflects, which is not what we or Betty want to
see him do, and is not a tactic that gets him anywhere,
delivering a down note.

13) Don remains our focus

character for another Turn
transition, as he again shifts
between the story’s two streams, in this case from the
personal to the professional. We’re back to the office as
the rebel trio pitches Lane Pryce, their put-upon
superior from the British parent company, to gain his cooperation. He
denies that the buy-out is happening. His resistance logs another down note.
Denying the truth is always a weak tactic, so we can perhaps anticipate
what’s coming next.

14) Roger petitions Lane by offering him friendship.

The withdrawn, frustrated Lane’s dramatic poles can
be described as isolation vs. belonging. By appealing
directly to the positive side of that equation, Roger is
making a strong bid for acceptance, which he gets
when he comes at least some distance toward them,
confirming that Sterling Cooper is being sold—though the parent company,
contrary to their understanding, is not. A partial victory still moves the
hope/fear arrow up.

15) Roger tries to give Don solace by encouraging him

to resign himself to the inevitable. Don does not
respond. They’ve moved closer to each other but this is
still a declined petition over an undesirable outcome,
and points the arrow down.

16) For the first time, we embark on a scene without

Don. It doesn’t arise out of the previous scene, making
the transition a Break. (It is not a Viewpoint transition,
as regular viewers of the series are used to seeing Betty
—our focus character in the next scene—in that role.)
Betty and her suitor-in-waiting, Henry Francis, have
the previously mentioned meeting with a divorce attorney. The lawyer
discouragingly lectures them, and embarrasses them by assuming they have
consummated their relationship. Betty’s dramatic poles could be pinned
down as shame vs. dignity, the latter of which she heavily connects to
outward appearances. Here we’re seeing her try to free herself from the
shame of Don’s falseness, only to face shame in another form. It’s always
tough when a character we care about, as we do for Betty, takes a direct hit
to a vulnerable pole. We feel Betty’s humiliation and receive this as a down
arrow.

17) Taking umbrage at his presumption, Henry and

Betty assert their power over the divorce attorney,
making him apologize for his assumption. An up arrow
reverses the emotional trajectory from the previous
beat.

18) Henry petitions Betty to stop worrying about Don’s

money, arguing that he can provide for her and her
kids. Perhaps because this gives her a dignified way to
forget the shame of letting Don win, she silently
accedes to him. The prospect of an averted conflict for
the two warring characters, both of whom we care
about, permits us another up arrow.

19) A Break transition shifts us to Lane’s point of

view, as he fills his superior Saint John Powell in on
the meeting with Sterling Cooper triad. To his dismay
he discovers that PPL is indeed also being sold. He has
been left in the dark by his supposed colleagues, a
betrayal that hits him in his vulnerable “isolation”
dramatic pole. He angrily petitions for recognition, for a show that his
loyalty has been valued. Saint John instead remains dismissively sanguine
about Lane’s departure. Lane takes this hard, and so do we.

20) Another Break occurs as we go to Don looking in on his sleeping

daughter, Sally, and is silently reminded of what he is about to lose. This
solo dramatic moment registers as a down arrow. As a
silent scene carried by Jon Hamm’s performance, we
can’t make air-tight assumptions about its literal
meaning. But given the rest of the scene, episode, and
series, it’s not a huge stretch to suggest that Don has
just sustained a loss in his constant war with himself.
The authentic man, the man who should concern himself with his
connection to his family above all, has been defeated by the inauthentic,
outwardly masterful Don of the advertising world. In his expression we see
the tension between his poles play out.

21) We then again go to a Flashback transition. Archie

Whitman tries to reassure Don’s (or should we say
Dick’s?) mother, Abigail, that everything will be
alright, but she rebuffs him. In response, he angrily
heads to the stables, announcing that he’s going to
drive off and sell his grain. Because he’s drunk,
Abigail tells Dick to go with him. All of this distresses our viewpoint
character, Dick, tipping the arrow further down.

22) Dick’s drunken father is kicked by a horse, and it

looks pretty fatal. Clearly a down arrow. This
flashback concerns itself with Don’s emotional life,
rather than the practical consequences of losing his
father, so I’m calling this a Dramatic beat. If you
instead wanted to label it a Reveal, I wouldn’t argue
with you, although no particular mystery surrounding Don’s father’s fate
has been introduced, and the detail doesn’t factor into the rest of the
episode’s plot particularly.

23) The Return transition that ends the Flashback

brings us back to Don as he gazes at Sally. Now we see
the full significance of his recollection: he is thinking
of the event that ended his childhood family, because
he’s now reaching the end of his adult family.
24) Moving again between Don’s two plot threads, and
thus via a Turn transition, we return to the Sterling
Cooper offices, where Don petitions Lane to come with
him and his fellow mutineers. He demurs, and Don
once more resorts to his invariably terrible tactic of
lashing out in anger. Another down arrow.

25) Don has a practical realization that breaks the

impasse: Lane has the authority to fire all of them,
releasing them from their obligations to McCann. This
addresses a practical problem and is thus a Procedural
beat, one that points us toward hope.

26) Don resumes his pitch to Lane, now invoking the

reluctant Brit’s self-interest. Don tells him, in regard to
McCann, that: “You’ll be a corpse knocking against
their hull.” Knowingly or not, Don is now appealing to
one of Lane’s dramatic poles, the need for belonging.
This gives power to his offer to include Lane’s name in
the company name—in the advertising world, there’s no more tangible
emblem of belonging than that. Lane accepts, for an up arrow.

27) Now united, the four move on to the procedural

task of listing the accounts they can take with them to
a new company. We’ve suddenly moved from the
despairing drama to plotting a caper. The scene ends
on a couple of jokes, as sure sign that we get an up
arrow.

28) Don barks brisk orders to receptionist Alison,

moving from plan to action—a hopeful sign, measured
by another up arrow. That’s three up beats in a row, our
longest series of them so far. Can the move toward
hope continue?
 29) Don meets with Peggy Olson, reminding us that
the show’s second lead has been absent from the
episode until now. Once more adopting a less-than-
clever tactic, he basically orders her to come with him
to the new firm. She asserts her autonomy, rebuffing
him. As proud as we might be for her, we don’t like to
see these two protagonists at odds. And his failure to bring her on board
throws a wrench into the escape plan. So it falls as a down arrow.

30) A Break transition brings us to another major cast

member we haven’t seen until now, account exec Pete
Campbell, whose dramatic poles can be summed up as
ambition vs. insecurity. As he offloads stress onto his
wife Trudy, we learn that he’s activated the ambition
side of his poles, feigning illness to attend an interview at yet another rival
firm. Armed with her weapons-grade chipper attitude, Trudy impatiently
dismisses his fussing. Though she’s a supporting character and Pete a
protagonist, the show encourages us to like her and to revel in his setbacks,
so her rebuff lands as an up arrow.

31) Roger and Don appear at their door. Trudy

responds with aplomb; truant Pete is gobsmacked.
Once again, in the world of Mad Men, any outcome
that gives Trudy a win and makes Pete sweat provides
an up arrow.

32) Pete starts to rebuff Don and Roger’s petition, at

which point Trudy sweetly calls out to them from the
other room, subtly warning him that he’s about to make
a terrible mistake. This quick exchange keeps the caper
on track and is funny in its own right—another up
arrow. Oh thank goodness for Trudy, who (in this
episode at least) delivers a much-needed lightness, and keeps pushing the
arrow up.
 33) But Pete still has a petition to make, to the primary
object of his insecurity. He demands acknowledgment,
not from Roger, but from Don. Unusually at this point
in the series, Don grants it. Another up arrow.

34) In exchange, Pete now meets

their petition, agreeing to join the new firm—another
up arrow. We’ve now reached five up beats in a row—
the longest consecutive stretch of moments moving us
toward hope. In fact, since beat 23, in which Don
realizes that they can just ask Lane to fire them, we’ve had only one down
beat.

35) So of course we need a down beat now. Pete

introduces a note of procedural doubt, asking what
happens if he comes up short on getting his new
clients to follow him to the new company. Don tells
him it isn’t an option—in other words, they don’t have
a plan B if Pete fails. This momentary down beat prevents us from getting
too complacent.

36) But after Don and Roger leave, Pete and Trudy
indulge in a celebratory kiss, canceling that doubt with
an up beat.

37) In a Continuation transition,

we move to a new time and place,
but still with Don, who appeared in the previous scene
if not its final beat. (As always, we want the map to
serve the meaning of the piece, rather than allowing
ourselves to get hung up over technicalities of the beat
system.) He and Roger commiserate in a bar and the topic shifts in mid-
scene to Don’s personal plot line. Don seeks solace over his divorce.
Disastrously, Roger mentions Henry Francis, incorrectly assuming that Don
knows about him. Having given him the opposite of reassurance, Roger
isn’t so much deliberately rebuffing Don’s petition as failing to grant it via
an epic blunder. The heist thread might be delivering up beats, but the
family plot has been waiting to pull the arrow down again.

38) Mortified, Roger asks Don for forgiveness. Don

does not respond—a rebuff, and another dramatic
down beat.

39) We stick with Don but shift to

the Draper house, for a
Continuation transition. In a scene of brutal emotion,
he wakes up Betty to confront her about Henry. She
meets him with defiance. This dramatic down beat
lands with special force, not just for this episode but
for the entire series, and Don and Betty’s relationship.

40) After that scene, we need a Break, both in

transition terms, and tonally. So we return to the heist,
and a comic scene in which Pete unexpectedly finds
nebbishy television salesman Harry Crane at the office
on the weekend. He must now try to conceal the plan
from him. Though Pete fails, it’s one of his funny and
thus enjoyable failures. It may put the heist at risk, however. Though humor
outweighs suspense, we might nonetheless mark this as a crossed
Procedural beat.

41) Harry finds out. Bert offers him a plum spot in the
new firm as Head of Media, employing an advanced
tactic not recommended for the amateur: the friendly
threat. Harry accepts, moving the arrow up.

42) The heist returns to the

practical realm as the assembled men realize they don’t
know where anything is. When a procedural obstacle
appears without an apparent resolution, it registers as a
down note.
 43) After a Break transition (which we later discover to
be a Meanwhile, in that Don wasn’t in the previous
office scene) we go to the Draper home as Don and
Betty tell the kids he is moving out. Don veers to the
fraudulent side of his dramatic poles, trying to reassure
the kids by lying. This has little effect, and so Sally and
Bobby rebuff his entreaty, for a dramatic down note.

44) Sally turns on Betty, blaming her for the breakup.

Here we’re seeing her start to become her father’s
daughter, a thread the show will continue to develop
throughout its run. Her angry lashing out mirrors Don,
both in her choice of tactic, and in its ineffectiveness.
Both mother and daughter end up unhappier as a result, and it points the
arrow down.

45) Don repeats a tactic—always a sign of a bad hand

being played—returning to his attempt to reassure the
kids. This fails just as hard as it did two beats ago, for
another down arrow.

46) Don switches tactics, training his sights on one

granter only, urging Bobby to be a big boy. Though
Bobby moves toward his father emotionally, trying to
accept this, as modern viewers we’re probably not so
fond of his invocation of old-school stoic masculinity,
and Bobby does not seem much assured. Let’s call this one an ambiguous
crossed beat.

47) In a Turn transition, we remain with Don but shift

scene and goal, cutting to Peggy’s apartment, where he
switches tactics in a revisiting of his previous petition
for her to come with him to the new firm. This time he
drops the peremptory assumptions for a full-on plea,
structured like one of his famous product pitches:
“There are people out there. People who buy things and something
happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is
gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.”
In a show that carefully avoids on-the-nose expressions of its meaning, this
speech presents the throughline of the show: grappling with convulsive
times. Don promises that he won’t be angry if Peggy says no. Instead, he’ll
spend the rest of his life trying to hire her. The scene leaves us in suspense
over Peggy’s answer—a down note. However, since it’s a show of truth and
self-awareness, something we hope to see from Don, we can tag this with
an up arrow. Down plus up equals a crossed arrow.

48) A Meanwhile transition takes us back to the office.

Ultra-efficient office manager Joan arrives, as the
obvious solution to the procedural problem of not
knowing where to find the stuff the gang needs to steal.
The episode has withheld her so far and now gives her
a gratifying entrance. We realize that our heist movie
has been missing a key figure—the planner, who has finally arrived. An up
arrow.

49) Don arrives with Peggy in tow, and we see the

outcome of their previous scene together: she accepted
his petition after all. Up arrow!

50) The group encounters a

procedural obstacle, finding the door to the art
department locked. Don solves the problem in action
hero fashion, by kicking the door in. This funny
departure from the show’s usual obstacle-and-solution
pairings earns another up arrow.

51) A brief comic character note ticks the mood up

another notch, as fussy Bert demands to know if his
accomplices, removing items from his office, have
washed their hands. This adjusts the mood without
forwarding the story, and thus counts as a Gratification
beat.
52) Don asks Joan to solve his living situation. She
grants this petition briskly, with the desired minimally
expressed sympathy, giving this beat an up arrow. This
rare up beat for a situation involving his home life
comes about because he has intertwined it with his
work life, where Don can now reassert power and
control.

53) Another sign of Don’s power comes when Roger

approaches him for reassurance: “How long till we
wind up working in a place like this again?” Don
suggests it’s not that important, which Roger appears
to take in stride. Given Roger’s general jaded air, that’s
enough to log an up arrow.

54) Don bends down to lock the main doors. Roger

tells him not to bother, which he doesn’t. This moment
reinforces Don’s reclamation of his much-valued
autonomy, for another up beat.

55) In a Break transition to the next day, sharply edited

for comic effect, receptionist Allison discovers the
heist and exclaims, “We’ve been robbed!” As in any
heist, the moment when the suckers discover they’ve
been ripped off allows the audience a moment of
vicarious victory, for another up arrow. It concerns the achievement of the
group’s practical goal—a Procedural beat. This begins an extended
denouement for the heist sequence—though not for the episode as a whole.

56) Another Break transition. Beleaguered Lane gets to

exult in his victory, and enjoys being sacked. A
dramatic up beat as he triumphs over his unfeeling
boss.
 57) And a third Break. This string of Break transitions
would have disrupted momentum during the heist, but
here give us the sense of all the consequences falling
snappily into place. On a brisk note of procedural
progress, we see Joan setting up their temporary office
in a hotel room.

58) In a procedural up beat, the group snaps to

attention as an apparent client call comes in…

59) …but then slumps in

disappointment when it turns out to be bumbling
Harry, who needs help finding the room…a Procedural
down beat. This comic deflation ends a streak of
eleven up beats.

60) Meanwhile, back at the old office, we see Allison

crying. Ken Cosgrove has figured out what happened.
A foil character who represents the ordinary ad man,
we like Ken well enough, and here realize that the
flight to the new firm will leave out some people who
maybe didn’t deserve abandonment. However, the beat plays ambiguously,
as we’re also still enjoying the discovery of our heisters’ clever victory.

61) However, our feelings about another foil character,

the self-satisfied, affected Paul Kinsey aren’t so
generous as for Kenny Cosgrove. So when he sees that
he’s been left out and reacts with frustration, we can
enjoy that just fine, for an up beat.

62) Meanwhile, back at the new office, chipper Trudy

brings lunch and a cake—and when there’s cake,
there’s an up beat…
 63) …and if this was just a story about getting the firm
back, that would be the simple final note. But its
counterthread is about the end of Don’s family. In a
reaction shot, we see that against the backdrop of
group victory, he remains melancholy. A down beat.

64) Don calls Betty, switching his tactic to

conciliation: “I want you to know I’m not going to
fight you.” She does not meet his concession by
coming toward him. Maybe that’s because, for a
character as overtly aspirational, Don’s “I hope you get
what you always wanted” comes off as a bit of a dig.

65) Rebuffed in his private life, Don goes to his work

life, where his power remains intact. He seeks
camaraderie from an unusually chuffed Lane, and gets
it, for an up note.

66) The otherworldly voice of

Roy Orbison swells on the soundtrack as a look of
hope and possibility appears on Don’s face. An up note
—will things be okay after all? Not if we know
anything about Roy Orbison, they won’t. We’re
hearing a deep cut from his melancholy catalog of tone
poem pop hits, a number called “Shadahroba,” about a place that promises
that the future will be better than the past, that it holds the prospect of a love
that lasts—a place you think of when your dream dies, your tears flow, and
you don’t know what to do. Note that outside of this song, no place called
Shadahroba exists. It’s authenticity, like Don’s, leaves much to be desired.

67) As the montage continues, we go through a series

of Break transitions, because that’s how montages roll.
Betty sits on a flight to Reno with her baby and Henry.
Her stone-faced expression suggests that her divorce
represents not a new future of autonomy and getting
everything she always wanted, but yet another assault on her dignity. A
down note.

68) Break to Sally and Bobby, watching TV with their

maid and a dog. The kids, most affected by this
change, have been set aside by their restless, questing
parents. A down note.

69) And one more Break. The

camera pulls out as Don heads to his uncertain new
living conditions and the sad Roy Orbison tune
continues to play, for a final down note.
•••
When recalled later, this episode acts as an emotional
Rorschach test. Do you remember it chiefly as the heist episode where the
gang steals their firm back from McCann Erickson, or the one in which Don
loses his family?
I admit I fell into the first category. But maybe that speaks more to the
memory-making power of the up beat over the down beat, rather than to any
regrettable failure of cynicism on my part.
If we zoom out to look at the trajectory of this very distinctive episode,
we see a slightly unusual line, marking the intertwining of its two strongly
contrasting threads.

Here we see marked changes in emotional direction depending on which of

Don’s competing stories dominates. A down-slope occupies the first third,
followed by an upward rally, a down-slope that wipes out its progress, a
steep upward slope, and a jagged coda. The first rally starts at beat 25,
where Don realizes Lane can just fire them. That puts us on a downward
slide until the shift back to Sterling Cooper business on beat 47, kicking off
our last generally upward slope. It lasts until beat 54 turns back to the
melancholy coda of Don’s now-atomized family.
Let’s now isolate the transitions. In the diagram below, each transition
appears with the numbers of the beats it falls between (rather than just the
beat it leads out of).

The episode includes 28 transitions. As one might anticipate with a story

that follows a large ensemble of characters, it relies heavily on Break
transitions. Eight of them appear in all. Turns, four in all, mark the shifts
back and forth between the two storylines, the rescue of Don’s work life and
the destruction of his family life. Three Continuations show us that,
contrary to the usual structure of this ensemble show, this is a Don-centric
affair, sticking with him for most of its length. The Breaks and Meanwhiles
(most of which comprise the ending montage sequence) predominate at the
end, when Don widens his world to consider his need for others, and the
impact of his actions on them.
Also unsurprisingly for a show that regularly delves back into Don’s past,
we see two Flashback and two Return transitions.
We see only one Outgrowth transition. Although this episode of the show
features an unusually high number of Procedural beats, its Obstacles don’t
require the characters to move from one scene to the next. Most of the heist
scenes occur in one place, the Sterling Cooper offices.
 10
Beat Analysis: “Home”
(from The X-Files)
When it first aired in 1996, during the fourth season of The X-Files,
“Home” acquired an immediate reputation as the series’ most terrifying
episode—and the harshest hour of horror aired on any network. The series’
groundbreaking overall structure has been built upon and transformed since
its heyday.
Viewed in isolation, “Home” remains a model of tight, self-contained
suspense plotting featuring not one but two classic—and classically
opposite—iconic heroes. Let’s dig into its beats.

1) An ominous scene: a decrepit backwoods house,

during a storm, with a scythe leaning up against a
barrel. Encapsulated right from the first shot, this
reveals the house as the problem, the question that
must be answered, the source of the disorder that our
iconic heroes must overcome. As such the introduction of the frightening
house constitutes our first Procedural down note.

2) Inside the house: screams of pain as a horrifying,

homespun medical procedure indistinctly unfolds.
Because it’s unclear, the scene poses a Question: just
what sort of operation is going on here? Even in
circumstances less overtly dire than this, Questions
typically land as down notes.

3) A baby is born, an umbilical cord cut. This Reveal

provides an answer to the previous Question beat.
However, given the continuing horror imagery, this
doesn’t entirely play as an up beat, as Reveals
sometimes do. This ends with crossed arrows at best.
4) Three shadowy male figures take the baby outside
into the rain, as the ominous score continues to
provoke our unease. Disorder grows, for a Procedural
down beat.

5) They dig a hole in the muddy

ground, even though the baby is still screaming. The
prospect of infanticide escalates the sense of disorder
even further, for another Procedural down arrow.

6) Flashing lightning allows us to see that the baby and

one of the men are both disfigured—more horror,
another Procedural down beat.

7) Indeed, as feared, they place

the baby in the hole and begin to bury it. Disorder
worsens, for yet another Procedural down beat.

8) One of the men wails, and

another comforts him by holding his shoulders. After
completing the burial the three figures stand
sorrowfully together in the lightning-illuminated
downpour. This is a Dramatic beat, in which the
wailing man petitions for succor and gets it from one
of the others. This unexpected moment of empathy for a set of monstrous
figures implies an inner conflict for them, and ambiguous feelings for us: a
Dramatic beat, resolving with crossed arrows.

9) Break to the credits—a Gratification beat for those

who enjoy this classic series opener and its emblematic
Mark Snow theme. Its familiarity, and the reminder
that series heroes Mulder and Scully are about to show
up and start dealing with this disorder, gives us a
breather from the awful scene we just witnessed. Like any Gratification
beat, its arrow points up.
10) A Break transition takes us to a sun-dappled field,
onto which kids toss a home plate and begin to play
baseball. The episode title appears: Home. The chyron
transforms—this is also a place identifier, telling us
that the action we are witnessing occurs in Home,
Pennsylvania. This beat introduces the first part of the
episode’s throughline, which takes the town from innocence to awareness.
Every textual cue tells us to treat this as an up beat, the very embodiment of
small-town American order. But with the visual rhyme between the muddy
field the baby was buried in, and in the context of the previous horror beats,
we can’t be blamed for taking this as a false order, a surface under which
disorder remains balefully latent. That makes this an ambiguous Procedural
beat.

11) As we watch the Norman Rockwell kids playing

and bickering, our sense of unease relaxes—even if
there is something off about the framing when the
batter reflexively taps home plate with the tip of his
bat. Even so, this beat conveys more order than
disorder, so let’s mark it as a Procedural up arrow.

12) The batter fouls the ball over a wire fence. A

particularly young, freckle-faced outfielder runs to the
fence and looks on in despair. The ball has landed “on
the Peacocks’ property.” In a series of Reaction shots,
we see fear run through all the other kids—a
Procedural down arrow.

13) One player finds a solution: they have another ball.

The outfielder happily retreats from the fence, and the
game resumes. Maybe they won’t have to deal with the
house’s inhabitants after all, attaching an up arrow to
this Procedural beat.

14) The batter leans down to cover his hands with dirt, all the better to grip
the bat. Again we are reminded of the mud, and the horror of the burial.
Another Procedural beat, another down arrow.

15) Play goes back to normal for a

few moments—still in Procedural
territory, but with an up beat.

16) Now the batter digs his

sneaker into the ground, and blood spurts up around
the toe. He steps up, revealing the buried infant’s hand.
The disorder, the horror we feared, has now
manifested: Procedural beat, down arrow.

17) A transition reveals that we have moved in time

but not place. Intuitive, UFO-believing profiler Fox
Mulder picks up the ball that the kids dropped, as he
surveys the disorder of the crime scene. Skeptical
forensic pathologist Dana Scully carefully examines
the hole the baby was buried in. The discovery of the
buried child has led directly to their presence on the scene, so this is an
Outgrowth transition. The arrival of our heroes implies a movement toward
order, as does the moment Mulder takes to casually indulge in a mimed
pitch. Procedural beat, up arrow. Note how both characters appear in a way
that visually recapitulates their iconic ethoses. Mulder, who solves problems
through belief and intuition, sniffs the ball, trying to learn something
through direct, sensory experience. Scully, who solves problems with
science and empirical facts, uses a tape measure to record hard numbers.

18) As Mulder continues to play with the baseball, the

inhabitants of the Peacock house come out onto their
porch to observe him. The score underlines the menace
they represent. This Procedural beat registers a down
note. If Mulder cared about the porch people and
wanted something emotional from them, the same beat
might play as Dramatic. But throughout this episode their relationship
toward him remains external—one of physical menace.
 19) Scully lists the facts she’s gathered from the crime
scene, visibly annoyed as Mulder continues to play
with the ball. Although we might normally be unhappy
to see our two heroes at odds, this is classic contrasting
buddy cop comic schtick, an integral part of their
charm as a pairing. The moment of amusing tension
culminates when Scully tests his attention by deadpanning that she’s quit
the FBI to become a spokesperson for the Ab Roller (a then-popular
exercise gadget). This combination beat both kicks off their investigation
(Procedural) and serves up some amusing banter (Dramatic). It follows our
dictum on informational dialogue by layering in an emotional element to
enliven the scene. This beat reverses the usual pattern: here, instead of
having a character work to get the information, Scully must work to provide
it.

20) Mulder goes into a reverie about the role of

baseball in his childhood memories, including those of
his missing sister. In this Dramatic beat he’s offering
Scully a confidence, petitioning her for acceptance.
She responds with another deadpan wisecrack, but this
time it plays like a genuine, if mild, rebuff, earning a
down beat. Mulder raised the emotional stakes and she shot him down.

21) Invoking the theme of the episode, the horror that

can lurk beneath bucolic appearances, Mulder claims
that if he had his druthers, he’d live in a small town
like this. Scully takes the opposite view: “It would be
like living in Mayberry.” In this Dramatic beat she
again distances himself from him, for another down
note.

22) The local sheriff arrives at the crime scene,

introducing himself as Andy Taylor—the name of the
sheriff protagonist of The Andy Griffith Show, which
Scully has just referenced. Mulder gives this a
“Really?” This detail winks at the theme without
advancing the story, and so counts as a Gratification beat, and thus an up
arrow.

23) Taylor provides the explanation of why FBI agents

have been summoned to deal with a non-federal crime,
so often required in opening scenes of The X-Files. It
answers a Question the narrative hasn’t posed, but that
nitpickers in the audience want to see acknowledged.
The Reveal gains some emotional weight when Taylor
says they’ve never had a crime like this before, not in a town this small,
making it a slight down beat.

24) Mulder notices that the Peacock family has been

watching and asks the sheriff about them. Though
visibly hesitant to discuss them, he gives a rundown on
their lives as feeble-minded recluses who live
completely apart from society. Though he dismisses
their relevance to the case, our genre expectations for a
horror story know that the Peacocks spell trouble. Again a Reveal has been
layered with an emotional resonance that makes it a down note instead of a
lateral one.

25) When pressed further, Taylor changes the subject.

He talks about his love for his peaceful town, and how
much he has feared the moment when the frightening
modern world would come from outside to change it
forever. In doing so Taylor petitions our heroes for
proof that he can trust them. Mulder meets this petition
by responding with appropriate gravity regarding the next step—a look at
the unusual victim. We’re glad, if in no way surprised, to see him show
respect for this sympathetic supporting character, so the moment plays as an
up note.

26) As a result of that beat, the locale changes, making this transition an
Outgrowth. We take in a ghoulish sight: a bundled object that must be the
baby’s corpse, kept in the sheriff’s office fridge along with cans of Spam
and a brown lunch bag. We’re back to the main
Procedural thread, and a down note.

27) The Andy Griffith Show joke

reprises itself when Taylor
introduces Mulder to his deputy, Barney. Mulder asks
if the last name is Fife, eliciting an exasperated
response from Deputy Pastor. This jokey Gratification
beat leavens the horror of the situation, providing an up note.

28) The so-called “clean,” so-called “examination”

room that Taylor escorts them to turns out to be a
cramped bathroom. He doesn’t want this done in his
office, to shield the innocence of the citizens—who
would know something was wrong if he suddenly
locked it. This establishes an additional procedural
obstacle while bringing in the episode’s throughline, innocence to
awareness. Taylor wants to preserve the town’s innocence by shielding
them from the horror represented by the corpse. The extra challenge
imposed on Scully by this inconvenient venue ends this Procedural beat on
a down note.

29) Nonetheless, Scully succeeds in gaining key

information: she finds that though the baby had an
unbelievable number of birth defects, it was breathing
when it died, making its demise a murder. As grim as
this information is, it gives them a lead to follow, a
positive resolution to this Procedural scene. (You might count it as a
Reveal, but this beat is more about catching the heroes up to what the
audience already knows or suspects, giving them forward momentum.)

30) Scully empathizes with the baby’s unknown mother, who has given
birth only to be cruelly betrayed by nature. This leads her to voice her own
fears about motherhood. Mulder grants her petition for assurance with mild
flirtation and a joke about his own family’s solid genetic history—“aside
from a need for corrective lenses and a tendency to be abducted by aliens.”
A Dramatic exchange that brings our heroes closer
together adds an up arrow to the map.

31) Turning serious, Mulder tells

her that they’re not facing an FBI
matter. In a reversal, it’s Scully
who informs Mulder they have a case on their hands:
the pattern of birth defects reflects a multi-general
mutation. That implicates the brothers, as likely products of in-breeding,
and suggests that they kidnapped a woman, which would be a bureau
matter. The disturbing implications of this Reveal make it a down beat.

32) As an Outgrowth of the previous beat’s discussion,

Scully and Mulder go to the Peacock house. A pig’s
head on the front porch adds to the unease as they give
its front yard a cursory once-over—adding a down note
to this Procedural beat.

33) No one answers when they knock, momentarily

blocking them. Mulder is about to enter when Scully
reminds him of the need for probable cause. He
overcomes the obstacle, giving this Procedural beat an
up note, by pointing his flashlight through the screen
and revealing a suspicious pair of scissors. They head
in.

34) They find clues confirming the involvement of the

baby-killing Peacock brothers seen at the top of the
episode—footprints matching the crime scene, and a
bloody shovel. That’s enough to convict them: an
investigative success, and thus a Procedural beat that
points the arrow up.

35) Assuming the brothers have fled, they continue to search the house. But
the camera pulls in on the desperate eyes of a concealed member of the
Peacock family. We likely assume that it’s one of the brothers, though we
 will learn otherwise later. The external threat posed by
the unseen watcher puts a downward spin on this
Procedural beat.

36) A Break transition (back from

commercial when seen in original
broadcast format) takes us to Sheriff Taylor’s house.
We feel relief when we see that he’s on the phone with
Scully and Mulder, and that they are now back in their
motel room. The threat suggested by the shot of the
unseen eyes clearly did not materialize. This relief from that turn gives us a
Procedural up beat. We might suspect that Taylor’s effort to set up a dragnet
will come to naught, since they may not have fled the house as assumed.

37) We stay with Taylor as he gets his gun, previously

established as something he doesn’t carry, out of its
lockbox. With pained expression, he takes it out,
suggesting that he, as the personification of the
episode’s throughline of innocence to awareness, has
begun to make that transformation. But then he puts it back again. Genre
expectations will lead most viewers to worry about his decision to remain
unarmed, worrying that the outcome of this internal Dramatic moment
bodes ill. The arrow moves toward fear.

38) A Break transition takes us back to the house,

where the three brothers emerge and begin to gas up
their decrepit Cadillac. That can’t be good: this
Procedural beat warrants a down arrow.

39) A Break transition returns us to Scully and Mulder

at the motel. As Mulder futzes with the TV antenna
hoping to get the Knicks game, they exchange more
badinage about whether he’d really like to live here
(the innocent place) now that he has awareness of its
infanticide problem. Badinage means friendship
offered and given, so this low-key Dramatic beat directs the arrow up.
40) Scully notices that Mulder’s motel room door
won’t lock. He points out that “you don’t have to lock
your doors around here.” This exchange continues to
reference the theme but again, as seasoned viewers
with genre expectations, we know that the inset shot of
the broken doorknob foreshadows danger, for a
Procedural down arrow.

41) Mulder reconsiders the danger and props a chair

against the doorknob. This lands ambiguously. The
moment is funny, because he has done an abrupt 180,
reverting to his paranoid awareness from his nostalgic
innocence. It is also scary, leading us to fear that the
brothers might try to come through that door. The beat
is also divided between the Procedural (taking steps against an external
danger) and Dramatic (Mulder’s internal conflict between innocence and
awareness resolves in favor of the latter).

42) The timing of transitions between Taylor’s house,

the motel, and the Peacock home might not have been
clear until now, but as the three brothers, back at the
house, pile awkwardly together into the Cadillac’s
front seat, it now seems pretty apparent that we have a
Meanwhile on our hands. As the car radio lights up, Johnny Mathis’ song
“Wonderful Wonderful” makes its first appearance on the soundtrack. From
this downward Procedural beat onward, Mathis’ unearthly tenor and the
song’s syrupy lyrics induce mental dissonance with the horror depicted on
screen. In 1996, this device had yet to reach the levels of overuse it would
later attain, making it particularly hair-raising.

43) The next Meanwhile transition returns us to

Taylor’s house. In his sleepwear, he comes out onto his
porch to brood over the town’s impending loss of
innocence. Genre awareness, and the positioning of the
previous scene, prompts us to worry that the brothers
are headed his way: Procedural beat, down arrow.
44) Taylor’s wife, Barbara, emerges to comfort him.
He grants her petition by heading back into the house.
This episode’s secondary identification figure has
come to a Dramatic accord with a loved one, which
reads as an up arrow.

45) Meanwhile transition: the brothers, accompanied

by Johnny Mathis, are now on the road. Procedural
down arrow.

46) Meanwhile, Scully sleeps in

her motel room. Is it her they’re coming for? That
Procedural thought prompts another down arrow.

47) Meanwhile, we rejoin the

brothers, in a quick beat
differentiated by a change of angle. Now we see the
road from behind the brothers, from a camera mounted
on the back of a car. There’s something just a little
jaunty about their postures, which ramps up the creep factor another notch.
Another Procedural down arrow.

48) Meanwhile, Mulder watches television despite a

terrible signal. A static-obscured hyena prowls across
the screen, then joins another in tearing apart the
carcass of its prey, as a high-pitched narrator describes
pack predation. We register yet another suspenseful
Procedural arrow as we realize the pack of brothers
could be headed toward Mulder.

49) Meanwhile, Taylor tosses and turns in bed next to

his wife. Our fear shifts back to him, for another
Procedural down arrow.
50) Taylor comes alert as he hears an engine sound,
and the headlights of a rumbling vehicle play across
his bedroom curtain. The threat of the brothers seems
to have been realized—we’re still in Procedural
territory, and headed deeper into fear.

51) Taylor hears Johnny Mathis playing—he doesn’t

know that’s bad, but we do. Looking out the window,
he sees the brothers’ vehicle and warns his wife to hide
under the bed. In this Procedural beat, the danger
continues to escalate, for yet another down arrow.

52) Taylor announces that he’s going for the gun.

Events have now forced him to reverse his previous
internal Dramatic beat, setting aside innocence for the
awareness of arming himself. Though we might hope
he can use the gun against the brothers, the prior
emotional beat gives us no reason to celebrate, so this
also resolves on a downward note.

53) Leaving the bedroom, Taylor sees one of the

brothers entering the house. The innocence of a town
where no one locks their doors has met the awareness
of the longstanding evil everyone has ignored. A
Procedural down beat.

54) Unable to get to his gun, Taylor picks up a baseball

bat. This seems less formidable than the gun would
have been, so this Procedural beat pushes the needle
down. Though we as viewers probably aren’t thinking
about theme and subtext now, the bat recalls the game
played by the boys when the disorder was first
discovered, and pivots a symbol of a pastime celebrated for its all-American
innocence into an implement of violence.
 55) The Procedural down beats on keep coming.
Cutting between Taylor and his wife, we see both of
their expressions grow increasingly fearful as the
sound of heavy shoes on wooden floorboards
reverberates through the house.

56) Taylor gets the first bat hit in, a Procedural beat
that breaks a streak of eleven down beats.

57) But right away the Procedural

down beats resume as the brother
is not much fazed and begins to
beat Taylor.

58) He grabs the bat and beats Taylor to death as the

sheriff’s horrified wife watches from under the bed.
Our fears are realized in this Procedural beat.

59) Another brother appears, and

starts sniffing the air. In this
downward Procedural beat, our fear shifts to Mrs.
Taylor.

60) The pool of blood from the

sheriff’s murder spreads to touch his wife’s fingers.
Unable to suppress a sob, she gives herself away. The
camera cranes away from the house as we hear her
being murdered as well: another Procedural down beat,
of course.

61) Johnny Mathis comes up in the sound mix as the

brothers hustle out of the Taylor house and into their
car. This Procedural beat tells us that they will remain
at large. Though this comes as little surprise and is
nowhere near as shocking as the previous beats, it’s still not good, and
registers another down arrow.

62) We shift in time but not in place, remaining at the

Taylor house, commencing a murder investigation
sequence that comes as an Outgrowth of the previous
beats. Deputy Pastor stands anxiously at watch. We are
back in the light of day as Scully and Mulder drive up,
their arrival promising a return to order. Mulder spots a
clue—the tire marks in the lawn match a big American car. This Procedural
beat shifts the mood upward.

63) Pastor supplies them with information, including

the fact that the Cadillac was abandoned by a motorist
and is unrelated to any kidnapping. The actor plays his
distress at the death of his boss as the subtext of his
otherwise dry dialogue, giving this Reveal a downward
emotional trajectory.

64) They enter the house; Mulder examines Taylor’s

body and identifies the murder weapon as a wooden
object. This demonstration of Procedural competence
moves us toward hope.

65) Scully reads the lab report Pastor has handed her. It
must be wrong, she says: for it to be correct, the child’s
cells would have had to “divide triple-fold in cell
metaphase.” Mulder floats the theory that we viewers
have already leapt to, that all three brothers fathered
the child. Scully lists the many scientific reasons ruling
that out, adding that it is only remotely possible if a female Peacock still
lives, which they know not to be the case. In a case of narrative irony,
having seen the birth sequence at the top of the episode, we know more than
the identification characters. When Scully is wrong, trouble follows,
making this investigative misstep a Procedural down beat.
66) Mulder and Scully discuss whether they should
head to the Peacock house now, or wait for backup.
Scully argues that it will take a day, with a kidnap
victim still in the house. Deputy Pastor agrees to take
them out there, evening the odds. This beat exists to
counter the stock question of why the protagonists go
into a dangerous situation themselves instead of letting a tactical team do it,
and carries scant emotional weight: a Reveal with a lateral arrow.

67) Scully raises another question: how could the

Peacocks know that Taylor issued a warrant for them?
They weren’t in the house when Mulder and Scully
searched it. Narrative irony rears its head again: our
heroes know less than we do. This failure to
comprehend the Procedural obstacles before them
strikes a down note.

68) In what we can assume to be a Meanwhile

transition, we cut to the Peacock family, who have yet
to be rousted by our heroes. We get the best-lit view so
far of their monstrous faces. We discover that the
previously seen peering eyes did not belong to one of
them, as we likely assumed. This Reveal carries an
ominous charge: Mulder, Scully, and Pastor will be outnumbered, and
continue to know less than we do.

69) One of the brothers speaks to the others, attempting

to pep talk them into assurance. His words ironically
echo the sheriff’s: they knew the day would come
when outside forces would try to change them, and
they must now fight to protect their home. Although
the other brothers grant his Dramatic petition by
springing into action to prepare for action, we’re not rooting for the
murderers to achieve family harmony: this lands as a down beat.
70) Mulder, Scully, and Pastor arrive at the house.
Pastor takes the lead, proposing to go in from the front
while our heroes come from the back. We also learn
that the Peacocks have been known to fire muskets.
This Procedural exchange, about external planning
rather than emotional needs, provokes fear, particularly for the gung-ho
figure who is not a series regular.

71) In a Procedural sequence shot, scored, and cut to

emphasize danger, the law enforcement officers
advance on the house as planned. When she gets
closer, Scully’s binoculars reveal that the brothers
aren’t inside the house. That throws a wrench into their
plan, and a down arrow onto the beat map.

72) The deputy continues up onto the porch and moves

through the doorway. Scully sees a booby trap atop the
doorframe and cries out to him through their radio link.
Another down Procedural beat.

73) The booby trap turns out to be an axe, and Scully’s

warning comes too late. It strikes Deputy Pastor, taking
him out. We see a few seconds of movement as one of
the brothers moves into the frame created by her
binoculars. Beat type: Procedural; direction: down.

74) Scully reveals to Mulder that Pastor is dead, and

reports that the brothers advanced on him like a pack
of animals. This calls back to the hyena documentary
Mulder was watching in beat 48, and prompts a
Mulder monologue describing them as having reverted
to the “most savage laws of nature.” This puts a new
spin on the throughline, suggesting an awareness that the oldest ways of
doing things aren’t innocent at all. Binocular shots of the brothers still
beating on the slain deputy underscore the point. This moment of
Commentary, a staple of the show, emphasizes the menace of the Peacocks
and keeps the trajectory heading down.

75) This leads to tactical discussion: with the house

likely full of similar traps, they decide against invading
and in favor of a diversion that lures the brothers out of
the house. The emergence of a promising plan—one
hatched by them and not a disposable secondary
character—gives this Procedural beat our first moment of hope since their
arrival at the Taylor house.

76) Our heroes are then seen inside the Peacocks’

pigpen, in an attempt to scatter their livestock. Mulder
cuts the tension with a wisecrack: “Would you think
less of me as a man if I told you I was excited by this?”
Scully supplies one of her own, pushing a reluctant pig
and calling out “Baa Ram Ewe.” This reference to the delightful kid’s
movie Babe, juxtaposed with this horrific situation, supplies a shock laugh.
Jokes = Gratification beats, which always lead up.

77) One of the brothers comes out of the house.

Procedural down beat.

78) Mulder and Scully duck

down. But the brother seems less
interested in them, or even the
pigs, than in washing blood off his hands at an outdoor
water pump. This moment of Procedural relief registers
as an up note.

79) But then he does notice the escaping pigs, and runs
back into the house. This Procedural beat plays
ambiguously, notated by crossed arrows: we fear for
Mulder and Scully if all the brothers come out, but
then again, this is the way they wanted their plan to
work.
80) All three brothers come out to chase the pigs: the
Procedural plan is working, earning our heroes an
unambiguous up arrow.

81) Mulder and Scully

successfully sneak up to the
house. A second Procedural up arrow.

82) Mulder uses a board to poke

open the door, triggering a spear
trap. A third Procedural up arrow.

83) They perform a tense search

inside the darkened house. Cued by the score and
performances, we’re waiting for something to jump out
at them and so feel fear on their behalf, for a
Procedural down arrow.

84) They find family photos suggesting that the

Peacocks have been mutants for generations. This
Reveal confirms Mulder’s earlier theory, allowing us to
take pleasure in his competence, scoring an up arrow.

85) They discover a woman under

a bed. Assuming her to be a kidnap victim, they try to
calm her, but she screams out in panic, demanding that
they go away. Although they’re interacting with her
through dialogue, this remains more Procedural than
Dramatic; they don’t need something emotional from
her, but something practical—her silence. Which they aren’t getting, so it’s
a down arrow.

86) Mulder pulls her out from the bed, discovering that she is strapped to a
homemade version of one of those wheeled platforms mechanics use to
work on their backs under cars. (Fun fact: in the trade, they are known as
creepers.) The woman looks old, facially disfigured,
and has had her limbs amputated. That’s a horrifying
Reveal, and thus a down arrow, if ever there was one.

87) Scully spots a family photo

and explains that they can’t take
her home—this is her home. She’s the mother. This
Reveal not only confronts us with the distress we feel
around the incest taboo, but also disproves the kidnap
theory that brought them here without backup. Another
down note. (It also plays as a dark realization of Scully’s previously
expressed fears surrounding her desire to eventually become a mother
herself, a motif that continues to play out over the course of the series.)

88) In a moment of chilling implication, Mrs. Peacock

rolls herself back under the bed. This creepy grace note
doesn’t move the story in any particular direction but
does upset us even further, and so can be counted as a
Bringdown.

89) While checking to see that the brothers remain

occupied with the pigs, Mulder and Scully confer on
what to do. They decide that Scully should try to
persuade the mother to convince her sons to give
themselves up. This may not be the most likely
Procedural plan ever, but the relative quiet of the scene
does provide a moment of surcease from the horror, for an up arrow.

90) As Scully heads off, Mulder warns her to look out

for traps, reminding us that the two of them aren’t safe
yet. This quick Procedural beat points the arrow down
again.

91) And indeed, the camera then pans down to, and
brings into focus, a tripwire. Scully turns down the hall before reaching it,
leaving open a Question: how will this get tripped? Like most questions,
 even those not involving booby traps, this registers as a
down arrow.

92) Mulder watches as the

brothers conclude their pig-
wrangling. A confrontation is
coming. This Procedural beat ramps up the tension and
pushes down the arrow.

93) In a Dramatic exchange, Scully petitions Mrs.

Peacock to accept her aid and is rebuffed, for a down
arrow. (Why is this a Dramatic exchange when we
called the last persuasion attempt Procedural? Because
here Scully isn’t trying to gain anything that will solve
the Dilemma. Instead she’s performing her duties as a
caregiver for emotional reasons—it’s about who she is, not what practical
benefit she’s trying to get. Not that this distinction matters greatly either
way.)

94) Switching tactics after Mrs. Peacock refers to her

sons as “good boys,” Scully tells her that they
murdered three people. The mutant matriarch hisses at
her that she must not be a mother, because she doesn’t
understand what motherhood is all about. Another
Dramatic beat ends on a down note.

95) Mulder watches as one of the brothers smells the

ground and realizes there are other intruders left to deal
with, adding a Procedural beat and down arrow to the
map.

96) Mulder blocks the doorway with a table and draws

his gun. In this Procedural beat he improves his position against the
opposition, moving the arrow up.
 97) Despite a warning shot, the
brother at the door won’t stop
trying to bust in. Procedural down
beat.

98) Another
brother looms up behind Mulder
with a club. Scully calls out to
warn him. Procedural down beat.

99) Scully
shoots the club-wielding brother, who goes down.
Procedural up beat.

100) A third brother grabs Mulder.

Procedural down arrow.

101) The brother at the door gets

through it and comes at Scully.
Procedural down arrow.

102) The two remaining brothers

struggle with Mulder, leaving Scully unable to get a
clear shot. Procedural down arrow.

103) One of the brothers grabs his

gun (or maybe has the deputy’s
weapon), for another Procedural down arrow.

104) Scully shoots the gun-

wielding mutant, turning the Procedural arrow up.

105) She empties her clip but both brothers remain up,
turning the Procedural arrow back down.
 106) In another Procedural down
beat, the mutants beat on Mulder.

107) Scully
announces
that she’s going for the mother,
drawing one of the brothers away
from Mulder and toward her. This
puts her in more danger but evens
the odds, and so counts as a Procedural success, with the up arrow that
entails.

108) Now it’s Mulder’s turn to shoot one of them, for

another success in a Procedural beat.

109) Scully stays one step ahead

of her pursuer, but he’s still scary
and she’s still in danger, so let’s call this Procedural
beat a down arrow.

110) After making a mighty but missed swipe with his

axe, her pursuer gets ahead of her and falls into the
tripwire. A booby trap takes him out. This Procedural
beat also serves as a Reveal to the Question posed in
beat 92. To our pleasant surprise, the answer to “Who
will get caught in the trap?” is neither Mulder nor
Scully, but one of the bad guys. That’s definitely an up arrow.

111) The number of still-extant brothers has become

confused during the fighting, so it provokes a down
arrow when Mulder poses the Question: “Where’s the
other brother?”

112) The accompanying Reveal points to the partial victory so common in

The X-Files. They find a hole under the bed where Mrs. Peacock once was,
but no Mrs. Peacock. We might be resigned to this as a
telltale pattern in Mulder’s world, but it still counts as
a down arrow.

113) An Outgrowth break keeps

us at the same location but jumps
us ahead in time. Mulder confirms that an APB has
yielded no sign of the two missing mutants. “In time
we’ll catch them,” Scully says, offering him
consolation. “I think time already caught them,
Scully,” he replies, granting her petition by indicating that he’s already fine.
His statement brings us back to the throughline: the Peacocks have gone, in
their upended way, from a bestial innocence to an awareness of the modern
world. This Dramatic exchange shows our heroes on the same page and
thus lands on as positive a note as a grim coda can get.

114) A Break transition brings us back to the Cadillac

and the sugary strains of Johnny Mathis, on a road at
night. We hear Mrs. Peacock’s voice assure her last
surviving son that they can keep going, make a new
family, and find a new home. Then the son climbs out
of the car’s trunk, where Mrs. Peacock presumably is,
in a way that suggests the conclusion of an unpleasant intimacy. She has
petitioned him to accept her consolation, and he clearly has. He then drives
the car away. This ends the episode on a note of ambiguity: the disorder
Mulder and Scully were called on to quash has at best become dormant. On
the other hand, the scene’s fatalistic humor offers us a way to safely and
vicariously enjoy the dark side, fulfilling a key clause in horror genre’s
implicit contract with its audience. So let’s conclude on a set of wonderful,
wonderful, crossed arrows.
•••
If we zoom out to look at the entire map, the trajectory of “Home” looks
like this:
That’s the irregular downward slope we previously saw in the cases of
Hamlet, Dr. No, and Casablanca.
The downward movement comes mostly from three sequences of
sustained horror:

The buried infant sequence that comprises the first half of the
pre-credits teaser, beats 1–8.
The murder of Sheriff Taylor, commencing with the brothers’
departure from the house at beat 42. Significant relief comes only
after the death of Deputy Pastor, when Mulder and Scully make
their own plan at the house to start dealing with the brothers.
Beat 84, the discovery of the mother under the bed, and the
ensuing struggle with the brothers in the house.

From beat 9, the beginning of the kids’ ball game, to the gag where Mulder
props up his motel room door with a chair on beat 41, our oscillation
between hope and fear keeps returning to a baseline. In one relatively brief
series of beats, a general upswing occurs. This starts when Mulder and
Scully take charge of the situation at the house, starting on beat 75, and
ending when they find the mother, on beat 84.
We’ve counted nearly twice as many beats for “Home” as we did for
“Have a Seat, Shut the Door.” Procedural beats can be quite short in
duration, especially on screen. So a primarily procedural story like this one
will break down into more units than one in which Dramatic beats
dominate. The events leading from the departure of the brothers from their
house to the end of the Taylor murders comprise twenty beats. Those beats
take up a little more than six minutes of screen time. A pivotal six minutes
of the Mad Man episode, in which Don and Betty tell the kids about the
divorce and Don then goes to Peggy to make a sincere second pitch for her
to follow him to the new firm, also runs for about the same chunk of time.
Yet since it consists of Dramatic scenes, even though they involve multiple
characters and changes of tactic, it breaks down to only five beats. A
heartfelt speech takes more space on the page or screen than a description
of a trip wire.
Let’s isolate the episode’s transitions:

We see fewer transitions here compared to the Mad Men episode, as befits a
predominantly procedural narrative, where momentum takes on greater
importance. Of the episode’s 19 transitions, more than a third take place
during the suspense sequence that occurs when the brothers drive from their
house and eventually wind up at Taylor’s.
 11
Beat Analysis:
Sofia Confronts Celie
(from The Color Purple)
The pair of previous analyses treat only major shifts in tactic as full
Dramatic beats. But you can also drill down more precisely into dramatic
scenes, mapping each movement in thought or emotion from petitioner and
granter. At this level of detail, our reaction to each separate tack taken by
either character registers as its own beat.
Alice Walker’s 1982 novel The Color Purple lends itself to this treatment.
Its epistolary format compresses incidents to their core essence. The
technique allows Walker to present a story of Dickensian sweep with great
concision, not to mention emotional punch. For our example, let’s look at
the key scene in which the protagonist, Celie, faces a reckoning from the
indomitable Sofia, wife of her stepson Harpo. Though long the subject of
horrific abuse from her husband, Celie has counseled the feckless Harpo to
gain authority over Sofia by beating her.
All beats in this scene are Dramatic unless otherwise noted. Transitions do
not come into play here, as we’re looking at a single scene.

1) Writing a letter to God, as she does throughout the

novel, Celie begins recounting an incident by
describing her recent troubles sleeping. The conflict
Celie describes is with herself, and she’s in distress—a
beat that ends on a down note. We hope that Celie
finds rest and fear that she will not.

2) She describes her various efforts to combat her insomnia, all of which
fail. Here she is trying to find an external solution to an inner problem,
making this arguably a Procedural beat, with a down arrow.
 3) After reading the Bible, an
inner voice suggests that maybe
she can’t sleep because she did
something wrong. She sinned
against someone’s spirit. This
realization offers hope of a
resolution, making this an up note in the struggle between Celie and Celie.

4) Later she realizes who she’s wronged—Sofia. At

first this seems like a breakthrough, giving this beat
another up arrow.
Now we come to an eight-word sentence that contains
two beats: “I pray she don’t find out, but she do.”

5) “I pray she don’t find out,” surprises us with the

discovery that Celie, having identified the source of
her insomnia, fears the reckoning she would have to
face in order to deal with it. In the conflict between
Celie and Celie, her fearful impulses have crowded out
the ones that would move her toward a positive resolution: a beat with a
down arrow.

6) “…but she do.” Although we might from a loftier

perspective want Celie to sort matters out with Sofia,
we’re now identifying with her sense of mortification.
And though we might be encouraged if she were the
one going to Sofia, it doesn’t feel like good news that
it’s now the other way around. The arrow points down.

7) “Harpo told.” The revelation that the feckless Harpo

has given her away supplies an additional note of
mortification. In those two words we feel the sting of
Harpo’s betrayal, and of Celie’s foolishness in trusting
him to keep their conversation to himself. Down
arrow.
8) Celie describes Sofia marching her way, a cut on her
face. The tension grows worse.

9) Sofia begins with a reproach,

telling Celie she had looked to her
for help. Her opening tactic is to shame Celie. She
seeks to hurt Celie as she has been hurt, and we feel
worse for both of them, for another down arrow.

10) Celie parries by disingenuously pretending she

doesn’t know what this is about: “Ain’t I been
helpful?” This is a weak move in a couple of ways.
One, it’s a stalling tactic at best and unlikely to
withstand any further pushing. Two, it’s dishonest,
reflecting poorly on a character we want to identify with. We squirm along
with Celie, for another down arrow.

11) Sofia deepens her shaming effort, thrusting back at

Celie some curtains and thread she lent her, along with
a dollar for the privilege of having used them. This just
keeps getting worse: another down arrow.

12) Celie refuses to take them—a

less shameful tactic than her previous one, but equally
unlikely to stem Sofia’s fury. At best this attempt to
reconcile keeps us in an emotional holding pattern, for
a lateral arrow.

13) In response, Sofia comes straight to it, shifting her

tactic to direct confrontation: “You told Harpo to beat
me.” Yet another down arrow.

14) Celie resorts to the weakest of tactics, sheer denial.

She keeps making weak moves in response to Sofia’s
strong (and justified) ones. Another down arrow.
 15) Sofia calls her on her lie—
another strong move from the
angry petitioner, and another
down arrow for the reader.

16) This leaves Celie with the weakest response of all

from a guilty party, that most weaselly of ways to
concede wrongdoing: “I didn’t mean it.” This takes the
arrow down further.

17) Celie has left herself open to the obvious riposte:

“Then what you say it for?” And the arrow goes down
again.

18) Walker describes a moment

of silent impasse between the
two. With nothing left to say, Celie can only behold
Sofia’s fury. Her inability to respond doesn’t bode well
for a positive resolution, and so calls for a down arrow.

19) Finally Celie says the first thing that might help
her out of this, admitting blame: “I do it because I’m a
fool.” The concession offers a glimmer of hope,
pointing the arrow up.

20) Celie continues with a broader admission,

admitting that she’s jealous of Sofia because she fights
back. This builds on our hope for conciliation between
the two, for another up arrow.

21) This “takes the wind out of

[Sofia’s] jaws,” moving her from anger to sadness.
This sign of understanding moves the arrow up.
22) Sofia explains how she’s had to fight all of her life,
growing up in a family full of men. Now she’s moving
toward Celie instead of pushing her away, pointing the
arrow up.

23) Then she draws the line: “I never thought I’d have
to fight in my own house.” Though they’re beginning
to understand each other, Celie’s offense still remains.
The arrow points down.

24) Sofia says she loves Harpo,

which offers a note of hope, and with it an up arrow…

25) ...but she’ll kill him rather

than let him continue to hit her,
which reinstates the conflict (even as it leads us to
admire her). The arrow goes down.

26) Sofia goes back on the attack,

telling Celie that she should keep on advising Harpo as
she has been if she wants him dead. Definitely a down
arrow.

27) Celie comes toward her by

confessing her shame, for an up arrow.

28) She obliquely indicates that

she has already been suffering for
her guilty conscience: “And the Lord he done whip me
little bit too.” This apparent move to bridge the gap
with Sofia allows us an up arrow.

29) The two exchange fatalistic epigrams about the workings of God. The
text notes that this puts them on a new footing: “This open the way for our
 talk to turn another way.” A growing accord between
them gives the reader an up arrow.

30) The other way turns out to be

a new petition from Celie, who
now seeks understanding from
Sofia: “You feels sorry for me, don’t you?” This show
of (not unwarranted) neediness points the arrow down.

31) Sofia reluctantly admits that she does. They may

be speaking honestly, but it’s an uncomfortable
honesty, which we might mark with the crossed arrows
of ambiguity.

32) Thinking she knows why,

Celie pushes it further, asking Sofia to explain. A
request for potentially unwelcome truths introduces
suspense, which in beat analysis we treat as a down
arrow.

33) Sofia reveals that Celie reminds her of her mother,

who her father mistreats. Although the two women are
building an understanding, it’s through their mutual
experience of endemic abuse. The beat registers as
positive on the dramatic level but negative on the
broader thematic plane, sounding a conflicted note
marked by crossed arrows.

34) Their sharing of stories continues, moving into less

oppressive territory, for an up arrow.

35) Sofia’s description of the nonstop scrapping

among her brothers and sisters leads Celie to say that
she has “never struck a living thing.” This sounds another ambiguous note:
 peacefulness might be admirable, but given the events
of the rest of the novel we wish Celie could fight back.

36) Sofia asks what she does

when she gets mad, and Celie’s
answer shows that she has utterly
repressed the ability to feel rage of any kind. This
moving and terrible revelation provokes our pity for
her, for a down arrow.

37) Sofia pushes her a little, and she admits that

although her husband sometimes “[gets] on her pretty
hard,” she shrugs her shoulders and reminds herself
that life will be over soon, and that “Heaven last all
ways.” This provides a classic example of a beat that
reads differently to the audience than to the character, with Celie’s solace
likely landing as horror to most readers.

38) Providing needed relief to the reader, Sofia

suggests that she ought to bash her husband’s head in
now and think about heaven later. The two collapse in
laughter, achieving the unity we wanted for both of
them when Sofia charged up to Celie in fury. Their
exchange resolves on an up arrow.

39) Sofia adds a reinforcing up note by proposing that

they make quilts together out of the curtains.

40) The chapter’s final line

reveals that Celie now sleeps like
a baby. The resolution of her
emotional conflict with Sofia has conclusively solved
her practical problem, insomnia. This ends the scene
on an up note.
When we zoom out to examine the scene’s full trajectory, we see a very
pronounced down-slope, as Sofia lays into Celie, and she responds with a
series of weak defenses. At beat 21, Celie switches tactics, coming clean
with Sofia, allowing her a partial recovery. Celie both gains and loses until
the conclusive up notes when both petitioner and granter achieve an accord
and get what they want from one another.

What You Can Learn From In-Depth Scene

Analysis
Except for those of you who write as a means of making yourselves crazy, I
wouldn’t recommend performing this sort of micro-beat by micro-beat
analysis on a routine basis. Or maybe ever, really. The analysis of Celie and
Sofia’s exchange serves as more of an academic exploration of the system’s
limits.
However, when a scene isn’t working for you, and you’re not sure why,
beat mapping it may help you understand the problem.
You might discover that its trajectory doesn’t match your intention for the
scene. Dramatic exchanges tend to follow one of a few basic lines. These
depend on who we identify with and which character gets the better of the
other.
A more-or-less flat line suggests an exchange in which both petitioner and
granter give as good as they get. This scene pattern contains the most
moment-by-moment variation in hope and fear. The only reason not to use
it is to avoid overusing it. The occasional scene with a more striking line
may add rhythmic variety to your overall piece.
A down-slope followed by a flat line, as seen in the Celie vs. Sophia
exchange, indicates that the identification figure either:
 is the granter, and initially makes weak responses to the
petitioner, but ultimately stiffens and refuses the petition
is the petitioner, and initially faces strong resistance from the
granter, and then rallies and overcomes it

An up-slope followed by a down-slope maps a scene in which the

identification figure is either:

the granter, and defends herself strongly at first, but then gives in
to demands as the petitioner adopts stronger tactics
the petitioner, who seems to be winning the granter over, until the
granter shifts to a stronger defensive tactic and rebuffs the
emotional demand

A down-slope followed by an up-slope marks a scene in which the

viewpoint character acts as:

granter, defending at first consistently poorly and then

consistently well
or petitioner, making the pitch at first consistently poorly and
then consistently well

A flat line followed by an up-slope starts with petitioner and granter

countering one another strongly until our identification character, in the role
of:

granter, rallies and defends strongly

or petitioner, finds a new and devastating line of persuasion or
attack

A flat line that plunges down also has petitioner and granter making strong
points until the character opposing our identification character rallies and in
a series of beats:
 strongly refuses the petition
or overcomes the granter’s objections

These all assume situations in which the audience wants the identification
figure to refuse the other character’s petition. In those rare cases when we
want a protagonist to fail, the emotional line flips on its head.
Having mapped the line, ask yourself if it matches your intent.
If you meant for the scene to include more consistent give and take, and
thus show a flattish line, find beats where you can give the losing character
stronger tactics, so she doesn’t fail in every beat.
Chances are that the answer to the question about your uncooperative
scene lies less in the shape of its line, than in the content of the scene’s
individual moments. The process of breaking it down, encapsulating each
beat for your map and studying the characters’ tactics, will help you find the
wrong note that sends the scene spinning off in an unwanted direction.
Typical problems within dramatic exchanges include:

Repetition of tactics. Real life arguments mostly consist of

participants repeating themselves, but in a dramatic work you
want to boil a conflict down to its highlights. In writing, when
you can cut something, you should, so cut out the repeated beats.
Unless you’re striving, for some higher aesthetic reason, to
reproduce a realistically frustrating argument.
Out-of-character tactics. Watch out for cases where you have
given a character a tactic, often a strong one, that she wouldn’t
actually adopt. The perfect response to a statement may not fit
the character’s background, desires, or outlook. This often
happens when you choose the witty line over something the
person would actually say in a naturalistic world.
Overreaction for drama’s sake. In pursuit of greater emotional
impact, you may have bent a character out of shape, undercutting
long-term believability or desired sympathy, by depicting an
absurdly extreme response to a revelation or request.
Inconsistent motivation. Finally, consider whether the entire
underpinning of the scene makes sense given the granter’s
desires. Does the granter have a clear reason to resist the petition,
given his established goals? If not, you have contrived the drama
of the situation in order to create gratuitous conflict.
 Now, Over to You
You’ve now familiarized yourself with the elements of beat analysis. To
recap, these are:

Conceiving your story, then identifying your premise,

throughline, core question, and boil-down.
Knowing and developing the characters at the heart of your
story:
the procedural hero, who may be iconic, with an ethos
allowing for cyclic repetition over multiple episodes; or
transformational, with a transformational arc and
tactical goal
the dramatic character, with a pair of opposed poles
animating internal conflict
the antagonists who oppose your heroes
the supporting characters who draw them out and help
propel the narrative: sidekicks, companions, confidants,
foils, psychopomps, and functionaries
Considering your stance: validatory, revivalist, comedic,
pastoral, satirical, revisionist, or metafictional.
Developing your story and identifying its beats:
foundation beats: dramatic and procedural
information beats: pipe, question, and reveal
flourish beats: commentary, anticipation, gratification,
and bringdown
Noting and modifying the emotional rhythm dictated by the
order of your beats and the outcomes of each.
Sharpening your pacing through an awareness of transitions
between scenes: outgrowth, continuation, turn, break, viewpoint,
rhyme, meanwhile, flashback, return, and flash forward.
For some complex narratives, you may wish to note the
interweaving of plot and subplot by thread mapping.
With these techniques and concepts in hand you are now ready to put the
system to use, taking the bits of it that make sense to you and setting aside
the rest.
Head on over to gameplaywright.net for the current link to Northland
Creative Wonders’ beat mapping tool, Story Beats. This browser app
enables you to easily create beats with their accompanying icons, plus
descriptive text, rhythm arrows to note outcomes, and transition icons to
mark scene shifts and their types.
You may wish to explore the system further by using the tool to beat map
a favorite television episode, movie, or work of prose fiction.
Or dive right in to map the story you’re working on now.
I just used the tool to outline my current novel and found the ease with
which it was possible to cut, replace, and move narrative moments
revelatory—far superior to any actual or virtual index card set-up.
I’d wish you luck, but the part of a writing career that turns on the
serendipity of contacts and opportunities lies beyond the purview of this
book.
Instead, I’ll wish for you what I always hope for myself when I settle in
for a day’s work:

the discipline to remain in the chair

the insight to understand the story as I am telling it
and the mental acuity to put it all together

So I guess, really, in the end, I’m wishing you coffee.

All the coffee you need.
—Robin D. Laws, Toronto, 2017
 Appendix 1:
Inspiration to Premise
Worksheet
The reflowable Kindle format does not provide a solid technological basis
for a useful worksheet, so instead, we’ve made the worksheet available as a
free, letter-sized PDF download on the Gameplaywright website:
gameplaywright.net/beatingthestory
For your ease of reference while reading this edition, here is a list of the
story details that the worksheet helps organize:

Throughline
Core question
Boil-down
Thematic opposition
Protagonist type: dramatic or procedural
Poles (if dramatic)
Procedural protagoinst type (if procedural): iconic or
transformational
Iconic ethos (if iconic)
Tactical goal (if transformational)
Transformational arc (if transformational)
Genre
Distinctive angle
Mode
Supporting characters (name, role, and notes for each)
 Appendix 2:
Beat Mapping Quick Reference
For each beat you find noteworthy:

1. Identify its beat type. For ease of reference, these are:

foundation beats
Dramatic
Procedural
information beats
Pipe
Question
Reveal
flourish beats
Gratification
Bringdown
Commentary
2. Write an identifying phrase, summing up the beat in a few words.
3. Note the beat’s emotional impact with an outgoing arrow.
up
down
crossed
lateral
4. If this is the last beat in a scene, identify its transition to the next
beat.
Outgrowth
Continuation
Break
Viewpoint
Rhyme
Meanwhile
 Flashback
Return
Flash Forward

A letter-sized PDF download of this quick reference is available for

download at gameplaywright.net/beatingthestory.
Also from Gameplaywright:
Hamlet’s Hit Points
by Robin D. Laws
The White Box Essays
by Jeremy Holcomb
Things We Think About Games
by Will Hindmarch & Jeff Tidball
The Bones: Us and Our Dice
edited by Will Hindmarch