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.
Core Question Example
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.
Dramatic Poles Example
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.
Transformative Arc Example
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.
Iconic Ethos Example
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.
Throughline Example
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 wan
t 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.
Quick and Flat vs. Extended and Vivid
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.
Beating the Story Page 13
