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the purpose of this beat is the same, regardless: to show just how overconfident and naïve the hero and their team have become.
The High Tower Surprise is simply another twist, another challenge to force the hero to really prove their worth. In a way, it’s yet another Catalyst. A curve ball thrown at your hero that they now must figure out how to deal with. And this time, pure effort, brawns, weapons, even smarts won’t get your hero through. Your hero must dig deeper than that.
Point 4: Dig Deep Down If the High Tower Surprise was yet another Catalyst, then the Dig Deep Down is—you guessed it—another Debate!
It’s when the hero has once again seemingly failed (in the High Tower Surprise) and has nothing left. No plan. No backup. No hope.
It’s the theme of the story.
It’s the flaw they’ve overcome. It’s the proof that they’ve changed. And above all else, it’s something your hero would never have done at the start of the book.
Point 5: The Execution of the New Plan
In this final sub-beat, your hero puts their bold, innovative, new plan into action—and of course, it works!
Your hero shouldn’t figure out what to do in the Break Into 3 and then just do it—with no obstacles, conflicts, or struggles. Make them work for their transformation.
the Final Image is the “after” snapshot. It’s a single-scene beat in which you show us what your hero looks like after this epic transformative journey is complete.
EXERCISE: THE TRANSFORMATION TEST
RITES OF PASSAGE: A hero must endure the pain and torment brought about by life’s common challenges (death, separation, loss, divorce, addiction, coming of age, and so on).
DUDE WITH A PROBLEM: An innocent, ordinary hero suddenly finds themselves in the midst of extraordinary circumstances and must rise to the challenge.
individual books within a series can have different genres.
If we look closely at what makes good mysteries so compulsively readable, it’s not the who, but the why. It’s the reason behind the crime, more than the criminal, that captures our interest and keeps us turning pages.
center around a crime that has been committed and a dark secret that lies at the heart of
you’ll need three key ingredients to ensure its success: (1) a detective, (2) a secret, and (3) a dark turn.
if this case in this novel doesn’t show them something they’ve never seen before, then what’s the point?
The dark turn is the moment when the hero breaks or abandons the rules (either their own or society’s) in pursuit of the secret or the truth.
the case within a case. The detective will sometimes start out investigating one mystery, only to find it intricately linked to another (often a case that was just ending at the start of the novel).
it’s usually this case within the case that reveals the story’s theme and teaches the detective some type of lesson about themselves.
In the end, the detective, the secret, and the dark turn all serve one inherent purpose: to show us something about the dark side of human nature.
A Midpoint twist will prove that it’s much bigger than we thought.
her Fun and Games change wasn’t a real change. It was just a Band-Aid.
We’ve all experienced some kind of “life problem” that required us to grow and change in order to overcome it.
(1) a life problem, (2) a wrong way to attack the problem, and (3) a solution to the problem that involves acceptance of the hard truth the hero has been avoiding.
