Okay, confession: When I generate a story, I don’t think about beats or scenes at all. I just write, because I’m primarily a discovery writer and I need to write in order to understand the characters, the setting, and the story. Usually, though, beats and scenes happen naturally in my writing, because I, like most of is, have absorbed these ideas from reading a lot of fiction. Then when I get into revisions, I really only think about scenes and beats if there’s a problem that I need to diagnose.
Sometimes “story beats” are used to mean, something like plot points? I don’t personally find that very useful, since we already have “plot poitns” as a phrase to describe them. So for me, as someone who studied acting (loooong ago) I think of beats as a much more micro unit of story. In theater, I was taught that beats represent the character’s, hm, emotional shifts, I guess? A beat is when an actor portraying a character decides the character makes a decision about something, or when something changes in the emotional landscape of the character. It can be big (they explode into anger!) or very subtle (a shade of doubt crosses their mind, quickly suppressed.) It can be sudden, or it can slowly escalate. I’ve also heard it expressed as, a new beat signals a new kind of energy, a shift in the energy.
So, in rewrites, when I encounter a scene that is just not working, and maybe readers have complained that it lacks momentum or doesn’t seem to go anywhere, I often look at the beats. I might find that the characters are locked into the same energy, there’s no shifting, no new decisions being made. Information might be revealed, but they’re not pushing the characters to a new emotional place.
Or sometimes I get a comment that the scene is too fast, there’s not enough time for the reader to absorb what’s happening. So then I sometimes find that I’m blowing through beats, cramming a LOT of changes into a single scene, often plot points, but also, emotional shifts as well. In theory (and I am not (yet!) an accomplished enough writer to really do this with any kind of deliberate intention) you can control pacing by controlling the pacing of your beats. You can have a sequence where you sustain a beat, then have several changes in rapid succession, and that can have a really cool impact. Or a sustain followed by a HUGE shift. Cormac McCarthy for example does this a lot, he’ll have a long sequence that almost lulls you into this state of… not exactly calm because you feel like there’s this impending tension? And then he’ll slam the door in your face with a single sentence.
I’m really terrible about scenes. I don’t really think consciously about scenes because I don’t really understand them? A friend of mine thinks of a scene as something that can be filmed continuously, which I like, but then there are those edge cases. What about a montage. Is that a single scene? or timelapse, compressing a bunch of time into one paragraph. Is that a scene? What about when you summarize — clearly not a scene, but can be embedded within a scene? So I ignore scenes for the most part.
Attached below (as a word doc) is an example of beat analysis. I directed this scene (long ago) so I know it pretty well, and this is the kind of thing I would do if I were an actor playing Lady Bracknell (one of the most fun roles ever in my opinion!) in Oscar Wilde’s social satire, The Importance of Being Earnest. Take a look at the excerpt without my notes, and then with them.
In rehearsal the scene initially felt super disjointed because the actor playing Lady B had created ALL THESE BEATS, and her speeches and dialogue felt really clipped, and fast-paced, with tons of forward momentum, while the other actors’ beats were MUCH more subtle and so their portrayals felt really slow in comparison. So that’s something to consider too: are you giving lots of beats to one character over another, and what’s the impact of that? You can use that discrepancy to build characterization and play with pace. And you can also see how a long monologue is made interesting in a skilled actor’s interpretation with beats, so that the entire monologue tells a story (for example bottom of Page 2-top of page 3) and doesn’t feel static.
In terms of what drives this scene: I think there are a LOT of things going on here, under the breezy humor that Wilde was so good at. There’s the tension that Algernon is constantly lying to his Aunt, both about the cucumber sandwiches (which the audience witnessed him eating in the scene before — he finished the entire plate himself!) and about more serious things, like his “friend” Bunbury, who is a made-up character that allows him to get out of social obligations and do whatever he wants. There’s also the tension of Jack and Gwendolyn wanting to be together in spite of Lady B’s disapproval.
And then there’s the larger thematic tension expressed by Lady B about the difference between what is Right and Proper in society, and what actually makes people happy. (This is something all the characters navigate in their own ways.) She gossips about Lady Harbury, who “lives entirely for pleasure,” which she finds distasteful. She even takes chronic illness as a moral failing. She is a hilarious and satirical character but through her, Wilde skewers the ignorant hypocrisy of that class of British society, judgmental over all the wrong things (French songs are vulgar, German songs “sound” respectable — of course Lady B is not actually educated enough to understand German, she has no interest in learning languages that are not English.) A lot of these are expressed, in this scene, by Lady B’s beats contrasting with each other (going from social nicety to gossip then back again, for example; going from personal disappointment to moral outrage–because for her, a personal disappoint IS outrageous! How dare someone be sick!)
So, beats can also be used to supply tension and theme! Of course it’s way easier to look at other people’s work and see this happening, and really hard to see it (and do it!) in your own… Which is why it’s useful to look at other work, and also look at other disciplines! You can find inspiration and craft lessons by studying music, theatre, engineering… really, anything that catches your fancy.
Like all tools, you only use the ones that are useful to you. Use the advice and guidelines that are useful to you. Ignore what doesn’t work for you. There are lots of ways to write and lots of different readers who respond to different aspects of what you write. The most important thing, to me, is simple, “Does this make someone want to keep reading?” And the way to make them want to keep reading — well, there are a LOT of ways!
It might be a useful exercise to read a play or a scene and think about it like an actor, and do a breakdown like this, too. Or watch a scene and pay attention to how the actors interpret the emotional shifts in the scene.
Happy writing!