Writing to the Beat: Overcoming Writer's Block with Beat Sheets

If you’ve been writing your draft and find yourself mired in writer's block, one option is to try using a beat sheet.

A beat sheet is one of the popular templates for writing a book- and there are plenty of them out there! Jessica Brody’s Save The Cat! Writes a Novel has a pretty popular one, but there are lots to choose from. If you ever get in the weeds with beat sheets, you’ll find plenty of them give you advice on how much of the book should be devoted to each beat- pages or percentages for each scene. Should you decide you want to try to go the traditional publishing route, this can be helpful because traditional publishers currently have page count expectations, though they vary from genre to genre. If your book is too long for their page count, looking at some of the beat sheets and the percentages they recommend could be one way of editing down your word count to make your manuscript line up with the traditional publisher's expectations.

I’m not aiming for those kinds of specifics in this blog. Here, I’m just trying to help you get a feel for some touchstone beats (or scenes if you prefer that word) that will help you get your writing going again, whether you’re a pantser or a plantser just trying to get back in the swing of things. Because we can all get stuck sometimes. These beats can sometimes be guideposts that make us remember where we wanted our characters to go.

Fiction Beat Sheet

• Act 1

  • Opening Image/Your Hook: Introduce your characters, hook your reader! Establish your stakes.

  • Inciting Incident: Something happens that is going to throw your characters out of their routine and into a conflict, an adventure, or danger.

• Act 2

  • B Story: Introduce some new characters, and smaller secondary story that will probably (but not necessarily) come back to connect to the main story in the end.

  • Midpoint: Are your characters on the right track in their adventure? Have they met who they need to know? They haven’t learned the lessons they need to learn yet because you’ve got half a book to go, but the pieces they need to learn that lesson are all there.

• Act 3

  • Bad Guys Close In/Internal Doubts: If your adventure is external, the bad guys have their plans together and are probably getting it together. If your story is more relationship/internal based, here’s where the insecurities and internal doubts are popping up again.

  • Dark Night of the Soul: You guessed it, here’s the lowest point for your characters. It feels like they’ve lost whatever they were aiming for and are total failures. Characters process their failure, find their inner strength to try again and fix whatever it is that needs fixing.

• Act 4

  • Finale: Your characters have their grand finale and show that they can win whatever task it is you set them. Which really means learning the theme that you set up at the beginning of the book that they didn’t understand.

  • Final Image: Hopefully (but not always) a happy scene showing the main characters in their current life and how they’ve grown, but this is going to be genre specific more than most beats.

Beat Sheet in Writing

So how can this help you if you’re writing and find yourself stuck?

Let’s say you’re Jane Austen writing Pride and Prejudice and you find yourself trying to figure out how Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy are going to work things out. You look at this beat sheet and think “Ah ha! I need a B story!” And in comes the dastardly Mr. Wickham to stir things up, making up stories about Darcy when he’s sure he won’t be confronted and then running away with Lydia Bennet! It’s a B story that makes both her main characters learn some important lessons about themselves to help reach the happily ever after we expect from a Jane Austen novel.

In this made up (and, yes, slightly ridiculous) example, Jane is just writing away and only checking the beat sheet template if she finds writer’s block looming. It’s a way to jog thoughts of what might come next, or what she might have missed that would help her out if she added something to her plot.

Or Jane can be a plotter and lay out her novel according to each beat she wants, tweaking according to her genre needs and expectations- she can make notes to herself on index cards or sticky notes if she has particular ideas about how many scenes she wants to take up particular beats.

Beat Sheet in Real Life

Beat sheets and other templates don’t have to be set in stone, and as a writer, you only need to think about them as a tool to help you- not as something you must stick to completely. If someone’s Official Beat Sheet says the Inciting Incident should be 20 pages and yours is 15, don’t worry about it. If it works for your story, that’s what counts.

Do you even need a beat sheet before you start writing? No. If you're a complete pantser (or chaos writer as the wonderful Cass Morris describes herself, which I think is much cooler) you just start telling yourself a story and see where it goes. If it works for you then, awesome! Go forth and write! Enjoy yourself! Having fun is the main point to writing, everything else follows. But if you find yourself getting stuck and you're not sure where to go next, something like a beat sheet might be one experiment to try as a way to find a path forward. Or, maybe write several very vague beat sheets with different paths and see if one of them jump sparks (yes, I did make that term up. I think it works here, don't you?) your chaos writer creativity again.

You may be a writer who wants (or needs) to stick to the plan the whole way through. When you have your beat sheets set out it could mean making it easier to write scenes out of order. Find yourself stuck Introducing New Characters? Do you already know exaclty what the Dark Night of the Soul will look like? Go ahead and write that out if it's clear in your head. Maybe it will spark the earlier scenes you're currently having trouble with. There is no One Way when it comes to writing.

You’ve heard me say it before- but these are all guidelines, not rules. Take what works for you and your story and leave the rest behind.

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