How to write story beats, and turn them into a scene

To write story beats, break a scene into the separate things that happen in it and write each one as a single plain line, in order, before you write any prose. A beat says what happens, not how it reads: “Lisa finds the café closed” is a beat; the rain on the shutter is prose. Once the beats are down, you write the scene one beat at a time.

What is a beat in writing?

A beat is the smallest unit of change in a scene: something happens, and afterwards the situation is different. Someone arrives. A door is locked. A question gets an answer, or doesn’t. A character decides something.

Beats are not the same as sentences or paragraphs. One beat might become a single line of prose; another might take a page. What makes it a beat is that the scene has moved.

Here is a scene in a wet October in a harbour city, written as beats:

// Lisa gets to Café Mercer ten minutes early, as always
// The café is closed; a sign on the shutter
// Tom isn't there, and hasn't texted
// She calls him; it goes to voicemail
// She decides to walk to the depot

Five lines. You can see the whole scene, and you haven’t had to find a single good sentence yet.

How do you write a good beat?

Write what happens, not how it feels to read. “The café is closed” is a beat. “The café’s shutter was down, beaded with rain” is a sentence that has arrived early. Save it, but keep the beat plain.

One change per line. If a beat has an “and then” in it, it’s probably two. “She calls Tom and decides to go to the depot” hides a decision inside a phone call. Split it, and you’ll notice the decision needs a reason.

Name who acts. “The door is locked” is weaker than “Lisa tries the door”. The second tells you whose scene it is.

Keep the order honest. Read the beats top to bottom. If one only makes sense because of something two lines later, move it.

Stop when the scene turns. The last beat should leave things different from the first. If Lisa ends where she began, the scene may not be a scene yet.

How do you turn beats into a scene?

Take one beat at a time, and give each the length it deserves.

1. Read the beat and the one before it. The prose has to get from there to here.
2. Decide what kind of moment it is. Is it something to see, something that happens, something said, or something thought? Most beats lean one way.
3. Write it plainly first. A flat sentence that says the beat is a fine start. You can add detail afterwards; it’s much harder to find the beat again inside a paragraph of description.
4. Move to the next beat. Don’t polish one beat for an hour while the rest of the scene waits.

A before and after

The beat:

// The café is closed; a sign on the shutter

A first pass that just says it:

The café was closed. There was a sign.

The same beat after a second pass:

The shutter was down at Café Mercer, a sheet of paper taped to it at an angle. Closed for a private event. Lisa read it twice, as if the second time it might say something else.

The beat didn’t change. The second version gives it a place, an object and a reaction, and Lisa reading the sign twice tells you she’s worried without saying so. (If description is where you get stuck, there’s more on that in how to describe a scene.)

How many beats should a scene have?

There’s no right number; a quiet two-beat scene and a crowded fifteen-beat one can both work. If a scene has one beat, it might be a moment inside a longer scene. If it has twenty, check whether it’s really two scenes.

A useful test: cover each beat in turn and ask whether the scene still makes sense without it. If it does, that beat might be a detail rather than a beat.

Should beats stay in the manuscript?

Many writers delete their outline once the prose exists. There’s a case for keeping it. Beats left above the prose they produced are a map: when you come back to a scene months later, you can see what each passage was for without rereading it. They also make revision easier. If a beat changes, you know exactly which paragraphs to rewrite.

The catch is that notes mixed into prose get in the way of word counts and read-throughs, so it helps to keep them visibly apart from the text.

Writing beats in ProseSpun

ProseSpun is a fiction writing app built around this way of working, and you can try it from the ProseSpun homepage. In a scene, start any line with // and it becomes a beat. It sits in your manuscript, set apart from the prose, and it isn’t counted: not in your word count, and never as a name to make a card for. After you’ve kept prose under a beat, the beat stays above it, drawn more quietly, and you can run it again.

From a beat you have two ways forward. Both propose prose and wait for you.

Draft (Cmd-Enter) gives you a handful of sentences under the beat, in your manuscript’s own typeface. Each sentence is yours to judge: click one to drop it (it stays readable, struck through) and click again to bring it back. Keep these, or Tab, puts the sentences you kept under the beat as ordinary paragraphs. Esc discards the draft and leaves your page as it was. If it’s close but not right, type a note on the Say what to change line and press Enter: the next try revises the sentences you kept, and treats the ones you struck as what you didn’t want.

Compose (Cmd-Shift-Enter) gives you a plan instead of sentences: a list of blocks, each one a Description, Action, Dialogue or Thought. For our closed-café beat a plan might read:

1. DESCRIPTION: The café’s shutter down, a handwritten sign taped to it.
2. ACTION: Lisa tries the door anyway.
3. THOUGHT: Tom would have texted. Tom always texts.

You reword a block by clicking its words, move it by dragging or with the arrows, change its kind, send it back to More ideas, or Add your own block. When the order is right, Write the plan. ProseSpun writes it a few blocks at a time; each run waits under the beat, editable, until you accept it with Tab or ask for it again.

Every suggestion reads your story’s Setting and the cards for the people and places in the scene, so Tom stays the brother who always texts. (How ProseSpun keeps a long book in view is covered in A novel is bigger than any model’s memory.) More on how cards work is in how to make a story bible that stays up to date.

When should you use Draft, and when Compose?

Draft when you can already hear the moment. A small beat with an obvious shape (an arrival, a look, a door) is quickest to judge as sentences. Keeping and dropping one sentence at a time shows you what you want, and the dropped ones steer the next try.

Compose when you know the parts but not the order. A beat with several things in it, a place to set, something to happen, a line someone has to say, is easier to arrange as blocks before any prose exists. It’s also how you lean a moment one way: more said aloud than thought, or the other way round. You choose that by choosing the blocks.

Write it yourself when the beat already is the sentence. Sometimes you type // Lisa waits and see that the line you meant is right there. Write it. A beat is a note, not a commitment.

Related reading: How to outline a novel and How to start writing a story (even if you’re not a writer).

Frequently asked questions

What’s the difference between a beat and an outline?

An outline usually works at the level of chapters or scenes: what each one is about. Beats work inside a scene: the separate things that happen in it, in order. Many writers outline the book and then beat out each scene just before writing it.

Is a story beat the same as a beat sheet?

Not quite. A beat sheet usually maps the big turning points of a whole story across its length. Scene beats are much smaller: the steps of one scene. The idea is the same, though: name what changes, in order, before writing the prose.

How long should a beat be?

One line. If you need more than a sentence to say what happens, the beat is probably two or three beats, or you’ve started writing the prose. Keep the beat short enough to read at a glance.

Can I write beats for a scene I’ve already drafted?

Yes, and it’s a good revision tool. Read the scene and write one line for each thing that changes. Gaps and repeats show up quickly: two beats that say the same thing, or a jump where a beat is missing.

Next time a scene won’t come, write down what happens in it first, one line at a time, and see what you’d keep.