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 re
ceive—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 needsif 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:
Identify its beat type. For ease of reference, these are:foundation beatsDramatic
Procedural
information beatsPipe
Question
Reveal
flourish beatsGratification
Bringdown
Commentary
Write an identifying phrase, summing up the beat in a few words.
Note the beat’s emotional impact with an outgoing arrow.up
down
crossed
lateral
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.
Trouble Spots and Their Solutions
Issue
Fix
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 the iconic ethos or source of disorder (in an iconic hero story)
Tie obstacle to core element
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 m
omentum
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.
Beating the Story Page 18
