Outlining Tips 1 – Beat Sheet

Been a while since I talked about writing … mostly because it’s been a while since I’ve really done any writing. Now that I’m reworking the plot for Zonduth 1, however, I’m starting to remember just why I always felt itchy to blog about writing tips.

I’m at the outlining stage (which is happening concurrently with the worldbuilding stage, because worldbuilding never ends) which means today starts a whole round of outlining tips.

1. Start With a Good Beat Sheet

A beat sheet is NOT the act of clubbing your bedclothes into submission.

Stories tend to follow a particular pattern – a baseline of events which drive the story forward and maintain tension through the book (or movie, as the case may be).

One of the reasons so many stories have a “saggy middle” is because the author doesn’t have a good beat sheet to keep them on task.

A good beat sheet reminds you to insert conflict based on your villain and to sprinkle in fun stuff in the middle. Have a B-story. Make things worse before you make them better.

That kind of stuff.

Everything from “the main character makes a decision which changes their lives” to “all hope is lost, and it seems our main character will fail” is covered by a beat sheet. Pick a couple of your favorite stories and you’ll find that many of them share these storytelling elements. Bilbo Baggins leaving his comfortable home to be a burglar. Frodo refusing to throw the ring into Mount Doom. Luke Skywalker choosing to become a Jedi. Fern saving the life of a runty piglet. The baby bird in Are You My Mother deciding to leave the nest to figure out who its mother is.

These may seem like obvious things … but when you’re planning 100,000 words of adventure, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. Especially when your brain is crammed full of teensy details about character behaviors and verb tenses and the correct way to use an ellipses.

I developed a rough beat sheet many moons ago, but then I read Save the Cat by Blake Synder and some blog posts by Jami Gold and have begun expanding and refining the beat sheet I work with.

You can find my current Beat Sheet here.

The beat sheet isn’t a full map, though. It’s more like a series of guide-posts, and it’s up to you (the author) to fill in the intervening gaps with interesting, useful chapters.

Every time I begin planning a story, I start with my beat sheet and build outward from there.

Related posts:

NaNo2010 > Outlining Kit
Outlining Woes
Outlining