Plot and Beat Board
A beat sheet is a structure above your scenes: the acts of the book and the beats in them, the turns a story passes through. Open the Plan room and choose Beats.
Choose a structure
The first time, choose a structure to start from:
| Structure | Beats |
|---|---|
| Save the Cat | Fifteen, from Opening Image to Final Image |
| Hero's Journey | Twelve stages: departure, initiation and return |
| Three-Act Structure | Setup, confrontation and resolution, with the plot points between |
| Seven-Point Structure | Hook to resolution |
| Freytag's Pyramid | Five movements rising to a climax and falling away |
| Kishōtenketsu | Four movements, with a twist at the heart |
| Your Own | Three empty acts |
Each beat has a note on what it does and, for most structures, where it usually falls in the book ("near 10%").
Assign scenes
Drag a scene from Scenes without a beat, along the foot of the board, onto a beat. Drag it to another beat to move it, or back to the foot to clear it. Control-click a scene (or touch and hold) for Open in Write, Move to Beat and No Beat. Double-click a scene to open it. A beat can have as many scenes as you like.
Once scenes are assigned, each beat shows where it starts in the book as it stands ("near 10% · starts 23%"), in red when it's well away from where the structure expects.
You can also set a scene's beat in Write: choose Scene (⌘D) and pick it from Beat. Beat is an ordinary field, so the outliner, collections and swimlanes can show and filter by it too. A scene can carry a second beat in its tags ("B story"), and fields of your own can ask more of each scene (see Fields).
Change the structure
Choose the structure's name at the top right:
- Edit Beats… renames, reorders, adds and removes acts and beats, and sets where each beat usually falls.
- Use Another Structure replaces the beats. Scenes assigned to beats that aren't in the new one have no beat; nothing else changes.
- Remove Beat Sheet… removes the acts and beats. Scenes keep their Beat field, so choosing the same structure again brings the assignments back.
The beat sheet is saved with the project and syncs to your other devices.
Checks
With a beat sheet, Plan ▸ Continuity also looks at the structure (see Continuity Checks):
- Beats with no scene, placed near where the scene would be
- Scenes without a beat
- Beats whose scenes come before an earlier beat's
- Beats far from where the structure expects them (more than 15% of the book away, once the book has 5,000 words)