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
OMFG YES I make MANY outlines, and they also never ever survive contact with the enemy the actual writing process. I'm really character-driven and of the whole 'ACTION IS CHARACTER' school and trying to diagram it out like that just makes me totally freeze up. I kinda envy people who can get it to work though! And like you say, everyone's going to basically have their own approach. I just get resentful when the writing books make it sound like you must follow This One Thing, or you're doing it wrong. But writers talking about writing is usually full of personal process details and idiosyncratic tricks and I love those. Like Annie Dillard going to a conference room at her uni or something and spreading all the pages of her draft down one of those long tables, and walking around nad around it until her feet ached. Or Le Guin always drawing maps, even simple ones, or finding a "shape" for her books: spirals, circles, whatever. (Shirley Jackson always wrote on yellow paper -- right up until the final draft she turned in -- because that helped loosen her up. She wrote how it was always a shock to see the galleys, because the paper wasn't yellow anymore.)
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yati
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Date: 2020-08-25 07:27 pm (UTC)OMFG YES I make MANY outlines, and they also never ever survive contact with
the enemythe actual writing process. I'm really character-driven and of the whole 'ACTION IS CHARACTER' school and trying to diagram it out like that just makes me totally freeze up. I kinda envy people who can get it to work though! And like you say, everyone's going to basically have their own approach. I just get resentful when the writing books make it sound like you must follow This One Thing, or you're doing it wrong. But writers talking about writing is usually full of personal process details and idiosyncratic tricks and I love those. Like Annie Dillard going to a conference room at her uni or something and spreading all the pages of her draft down one of those long tables, and walking around nad around it until her feet ached. Or Le Guin always drawing maps, even simple ones, or finding a "shape" for her books: spirals, circles, whatever. (Shirley Jackson always wrote on yellow paper -- right up until the final draft she turned in -- because that helped loosen her up. She wrote how it was always a shock to see the galleys, because the paper wasn't yellow anymore.)