Opening Image (1) We’re reintroduced to all of our favorite characters, Woody, Buzz, and friends, in. Blake Snyder's beat sheet is my favorite take on structure, but I think any method of story structure (Jospeh Campbell's Monomyth, Dan Harmon's Story Circle, Syd Field, Robert Mckee, etc.) is just saying the same thing in a different way.
- Blake Snyder Death
- Blake Snyder Beat Sheet Calculator
- Blank Beat Sheet
- Blake Snyder Beat Sheet Template
- Save The Cat Beat Sheet Blank
Blake Snyder's book Save the Cat! Gets a little more detailed than most manuals about what should happen minute-for-minute in a compelling film. Today we're going to look at the first three BEATS, or mini-acts, he has identified within all good screenplays. These beats are described in Blake Snyder's BEAT SHEET, and are laid out.
About the same time I revisted the BS2, Jami Gold posted an excellent article about using beat sheets with Scrivener. What I liked most about the article was the idea of using the target word count for individual chapters and scenes to lay out the beats.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to word counts, I find big numbers like 100k pretty intimidating. One of the beauties of the beat sheet is that it breaks down these numbers into manageable chunks. For a 100k-word novel, however, some of those chunks are still 25k words, so I took the idea one step further, with Scrivener.
These three acts can be broken up into the fifteen beats of Blake Snyder’s Beat Sheet. That Beat Sheet is then fleshed out across forty index cards, which the writer uses to maintain an overview of the film’s plot while crafting the script. There are four rows of ten. The Blake Snyder Beat Sheet breaks down three-act screenplay structure into 15 bite-size, manageable sections called beats, each with a specific goal for your overall story. Below is an explanation of each beat. The page numbers are not strict, they are approximations of where the beats should occur in a 110 page screenplay. THE BLAKE SNYDER.
Before we get started
I’m assuming that you have used, or are at least familiar with, beat sheets and how they work. If you’re not, this post may be a little confusing and I recommend reading Jami Gold’s Beat Sheets 101 post, or Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat.
If you’re familiar with beat sheets but aren’t sure what your word count should be, trying aiming for your genre’s average. If you’re writing an obscure sub-genre or a mashup, try googling “average word count [your genre]”.
Example: average word count space opera
Breaking the beat sheet into chapters
For most, your chapters are going to be shorter than your beats, and using them to break up the larger chunks of the beat sheet is fairly straight-forward. When you set up a new project in Scrivener, instead of creating folders to reflect the individual beats (opening image, turning point, catalyst, etc), create as many chapters as you think will have in your final novel.
How do you decide how many chapters your finished novel might have? Good question. Easy answer. Find a few novels in your genre and count the number of chapters. Come up with an average and that’s how many chapters you should create.
Example: For my space opera novel, I used Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series, which has roughly 25 chapters per book
After that, the word goal per chapter is even easier, just divide your total word goal by the number of chapters.
Example: In my case it was 100k words / 25 chapters = 4000 words per chapter.
It’s important to remember that the chapters you’re adding now, and their associated word targets, are approximations. Your story will be as long or a short as it needs to be and, in all likelihood, you’ll add and delete chapters as writing progresses. Right now, they’re just there to help you break your story into smaller, more manageable chunks.
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TIP: Creating chapters with word targets, the easy way
By default, when you create a new document in Scrivener’s Draft/Manuscript folder (where you’ll do all of your writing), it creates a new file or Scene. You have to preform a few extra steps (or just remember the shortcut) to create folders, and then there are even more steps to assign a word target to each new folder.
Thankfully, there’s an easier way, all you have to do is create a new default subdocument type. Here’s how.
Blake Snyder Death
- Create a new folder in the Templates folder, name it ‘Chapter’ or ‘Bob’ or, really, whatever takes your fancy
- Switch the view to Outline (View -> Outline or cmd+3)
- Add the Target column to the outline (View -> Outliner Columns -> Target). If it’s already in your Outline view, it will have a tick next to it
- Enter the word target per chapter in the Target column
- Select the Draft/Manuscript folder
- Change it’s default subdocument type to the folder you just created in Templates (Documents -> Default New Subdocument Type -> [the folder you created]).
That’s it! Now all you have to do is hit cmd+N to create as many chapters as you need.
Assigning chapters and scenes to beats
At this point, you’ll note that the beats don’t fit nicely into chapters; some, like Act II and Midpoint, don’t even have word counts, while Setup overlaps with Opening Image and Theme Stated. The key here, is to be flexible and not get caught up in exact numbers.
If mapping out the beats seems a little daunting; using the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet: 7-point system redux template, try mapping out the stages (using the Stages column) first. Using labels, and the words per beat column, roughly map out the number of chapters in each stage by dividing the total word count for each stage by the number of words per chapter.
Example: Turning point 1 = 13,650 words / 4000 words per chapter = 3.4 chapters
For those awkward numbers with decimal points, try rounding the number up or down to the nearest whole number.
Example:
Turning point 1 (rounded to the nearest whole number) = 3 chapters
Act II Part 1 = 6.825 chapters = 7 chapters (when rounded)
For the next part, you will need to add scenes to your chapters.
As you did with the Stages, go back through the beat sheet and divide the beats into chapters. 3m pl300 software download. Take a closer look at the screenshot above, and you will note that I haven’t named my chapters after my beats, I’ve named the scenes within them instead.
Assigning your beats to scenes instead of chapters just makes the whole process easier. For one, some beats, such as Opening Image at 1000 words, are shorter than a chapter, and others, like Theme Stated, don’t have a word count at all (I gave them a default target of 1000 words). The other, longer beats (Debate, B-Story) can be slotted in around these and between chapters and you can vary the word goal of each, as needed.
Example:
- Chapter 12
- Fun & Games (4000 words)
- Chapter 13
- Fun & Games (3000 words)
- Midpoint (1000 words)
- Chapter 14
- Bad Guys Close In (4000 words)
You’ll need to do some more creative thinking, and a little massaging of scenes and chapters, to get the beat sheet to fit just right, but that’s part of the fun.
What’s next?
That all depends on you. If you’re feeling plannery, you can try outlining your chapters and scenes, but if you’re feeling more panster-ish, dive right on in and start writing that 100k-word sucker.
Blake Snyder Beat Sheet Calculator
Best for those outling a new work.
What’s awesome about it
- The word count for each beat
What’s not-so-awesome
- It’s daunting, especially when your manuscript is half-written
- No capacity to outline subplots
The awesome
When I first came across Blake Synder’s Beat Sheet (BS2), I was half-way through the manuscript for Hero and the word count for each beat made me to blanch. The idea of trying to shoehorn my (at that point in time) pantsed story into all of those little boxes (opening image, catalyst, black moment) with their prescribed word counts, was more than my brain could take, but when I went back to the BS2, a new story in mind, they appeared as godsends.
I don’t know about you, but I often find myself wondering how long the different stages of my plot (setup, act II, etc) should be. The BS2 solves that issue by calculating when a stage should start and end, based on your overall word count. Say you want to write a 100,000-word novel (about 400 pages), then your setup should be around 9,000 words long and the first half of your second act 27,500.
It also has the side-benefit of breaking your manuscript into manageable chunks; instead of stressing about only having 13,000 words done, you can celebrate having written Turning Point 1.
The not-so-awesome
Blank Beat Sheet
If you’ve come across a beat sheet template and haven’t read Blake Snyder’s book, Save the Cat, it can be daunting. The descriptions of the beats included in the template don’t fully adequately what’s meant to happen in each beat, and finding more information on the internet is practially impossible (or else I wasn’t looking in the right places).
In the end, I bought Save the Cat, and it was worth every one of the ten dollars I spent on it.
What I love most about the 7-point plot system, and which BS2 doesn’t do at all, is the ability to outline subplots alongside the main plot and then layer them to see how they interact.
I suppose that you could use multiple beat sheets, one for each subplot, or simply incorporate each subplot into the main outline, but that doesn’t offer the same flexibility as the 7-point system.
To get around this, I created my initial outline using the 7-point method and then expanded it with the beat sheet (the process of which I will discuss in another post), which gave me the best of both worlds, the subplot layering and the word count.
The Goodies
As part of my experimentation with the BS2, I updated the existing template with two additional columns.
Blake Snyder Beat Sheet Template
The first, 7-Point Plot Arc, is a summary of each stage of your initial outline (completed using the 7-point plot system). The second, Words in Beat, is the number of words in each of the fifteen beats, which is handy for such things as adding targets word counts to chapters and scenes in Scrivener.
Save The Cat Beat Sheet Blank
- Blake Synder’s Beat Sheet: the 7-point system redux (Numbers | Excel)