If you’ve read anything about story structure, you’ve run into the word beat. It sounds like something a drum machine makes, or a route a police officer walks, and it has the air of a manual you’d rather not open. Relax. It’s much simpler than it sounds.
A beat is a moment when something changes
That’s it. That’s the definition.
In Wanted: One Dragon, Sunday Plot’s sample novel, Mara has spent a year in town without anyone asking her out for a coffee. Up to that point, nothing changes. Then, one Sunday morning, the dragon egg’s glass case is empty, and the only person without an alibi is her. That’s a beat: after the theft, Mara can’t keep hiding in her library. Something has changed.
Deep down, a novel is a chain of those moments. Some are small, some are huge. The beats in a structure are the most important ones: the ones that hold the story up, like the beams in a house. You can move the furniture around as much as you like, but it’s worth knowing where the beams are.
Why there are lists of beats
People noticed a long time ago that a lot of stories that work share a similar skeleton. Someone is living their normal life, something happens, they resist a bit, they jump in, things go well for a while, then terribly, they hit bottom and in the end they get back up (or don’t) as a different person.
Different authors have named those pieces, each in their own way: the Hero’s Journey, three acts, seven points. At Sunday Plot we have our own, Wake the Dragon. They’re maps of the same territory drawn by different mapmakers. None of them is the truth. All of them are useful.
The book from start to finish, with its beams
This Is How It Is
This Looks Promising
This Is Getting Ugly
This Is the End
- 1 Nothing to See Here (Yet) · 0–10%
- 2 All Hell Breaks Loose · 10%
- 3 Somebody Else’s Job · 10–20% · flexible
- 4 No Turning Back · 20% · flexible
- 5 Now for the Fun Part · 20–45%
- 6 That Wasn’t in the Plan · 25% · flexible
- 7 Someone Has Other Plans · 35%
- 8 Upside Down · 50%
- 9 On the Offensive · 50–60% · flexible
- 10 I Smell Smoke · 60–75%
- 11 Rock Bottom · 75%
- 12 Now It All Makes Sense · 75–80% · flexible
- 13 Go Big or Go Home · 80–95%
- 14 Happily Ever After (or Not) · 95–100%
“But I don’t want to write by formula”
It’s the most common objection, and a very reasonable one. Nobody wants to write a novel that reads like a filled-in template.
The thing is, beats don’t tell you what happens, only that something has to happen somewhere around there. “Near the end of the first quarter, your protagonist makes a decision they can’t take back.” Which decision, how, why and to what soundtrack is up to you.
Think of it like a cake recipe: flour, eggs, sugar, oven. That recipe has given us lemon cake, chocolate cake and a zucchini cake nobody asked for that turned out to be surprisingly good. The recipe takes nothing away from the cook.
And if at some point a beat doesn’t fit your story, change it or remove it. It’s your novel, not an exam.
How to use them without stressing
Don’t fill them in order. Lots of people start at the beginning and get stuck on the third one. Try starting at the end: how does your novel finish? Then the moment all hell breaks loose (“All Hell Breaks Loose”) and the one that turns the story over (“Upside Down”). With those three in place, the rest almost falls into line on its own.
Write a line, not a chapter. A beat is “The dragon egg is stolen and Mara gets the blame.” You don’t need more. The details will come when you write the scenes.
Leave gaps. If you don’t know what happens in “I Smell Smoke” (yes, that beat really is called that; something’s burning and you don’t know what yet), leave it blank and move on. Sometimes the answer turns up once you’ve sorted out the ones around it.
Change them. The beats you write today are a draft. If you think of something better tomorrow, delete and move on. Nothing is set in stone, not even in Sunday Plot.
For today
Pick a beat, just one, and write one sentence. We’d suggest the ending or “All Hell Breaks Loose,” since they pull the rest along. Once you have it, you’ll have done something a lot of people with a novel “in their head” have never done: decide.
On Sunday Plot’s Structure screen you’ll find every beat of your template lined up, each with its own space. Fill in the ones you know. The rest can wait.