I tend to avoid modern how-to-write books because I am afraid of having the centipede problem.
Oh, there was a bit of that when I sat down to write these essays . . . <lol>
I have to confess I never really know what a "beat" is.
That's totally legit, because it can mean multiple different things! In addition to what you've said, when I took an acting class, our textbook defined it as "the period in which you pursue one objective until it is either won, lost, or interrupted" -- but that's a definition intended to be used within a single scene, where the "objective" might be as small as "get this other character's attention" before moving on to the objective "present my request." When people talk about it as a matter of large-scale pacing, they usually mean the croquet wickets the narrative ball needs to pass through along the path of a given type of plot, e.g. a romance needs the beat where the two romantic leads meet for the first time on the page, or one much later on where it looks like they will ~never be together~ (right before they are). There's a subset of writers who are very much helped by having "beat sheets" that help them pace out when they should be ticking off those boxes, which I think is why you hear the term a lot these days. Me, I find the concept of a beat sheet to a horrifying straitjacket, but that's fine; I know I'm somebody who intuits structure more than she builds it consciously. Different people need different approaches.
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yati
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Date: 2020-08-25 07:09 pm (UTC)Oh, there was a bit of that when I sat down to write these essays . . . <lol>
I have to confess I never really know what a "beat" is.
That's totally legit, because it can mean multiple different things! In addition to what you've said, when I took an acting class, our textbook defined it as "the period in which you pursue one objective until it is either won, lost, or interrupted" -- but that's a definition intended to be used within a single scene, where the "objective" might be as small as "get this other character's attention" before moving on to the objective "present my request." When people talk about it as a matter of large-scale pacing, they usually mean the croquet wickets the narrative ball needs to pass through along the path of a given type of plot, e.g. a romance needs the beat where the two romantic leads meet for the first time on the page, or one much later on where it looks like they will ~never be together~ (right before they are). There's a subset of writers who are very much helped by having "beat sheets" that help them pace out when they should be ticking off those boxes, which I think is why you hear the term a lot these days. Me, I find the concept of a beat sheet to a horrifying straitjacket, but that's fine; I know I'm somebody who intuits structure more than she builds it consciously. Different people need different approaches.