[Image above: Peter Kubik’s UFO shaped electronic drums, as featured at the Yanko Design site. The Yanko site says, “This electronic drum produces lighted impressions of your hand in psychedelic colors as it strikes the surface.”]
When it comes to storytelling, are you a mechanic or a gardener? A little of both? Or something else entirely? Does it depend, for you, whether the story in question is a first draft or not? Do you draft the thing in a huge undisciplined rush, and go back over it with a scalpel and yardstick? Or vice-versa?All these questions beset me now that I’ve read Roz Morris’s latest post at her Nail Your Novel blog. In it, she shows an example of a technique she’s described before, something called a “beat sheet” — applied to the first four chapters of Harry Potter and the Philosophers [USA: Sorcerer’s] Stone:
I’ve had a number of requests for close-up examples of a beat sheet — my method for assessing an entire manuscript in summarised form to analyse its strengths and weaknesses, and make a detailed plan for revising — and you can find full instructions here and here.
In rough outline, I’d describe a beat sheet as a page or more of highly condensed, color-coded annotations on the structure and rhythms of your novel’s scenes. As such, it’s not a tool for mapping out a story before you start it (although, hmm, I guess it might be…?). It’s a retrospective tool: something like one of those ultra-photogenic blacklights used in CSI-style television shows — when you flick the switch, the signs of life in your story will either glow noticeably or, well, not. (Only here, of course, that’s a good thing!)
In one of those earlier posts, Roz says:
My first drafts are dreadful; clumsily written splurges of description, overwrought emotions, half-baked characterisation. Some scenes go on for ever; some are far too brief. I’m not a good writer; I’m a rewriter.
This made me extremely uncomfortable to read. By no stretch of the imagine could I be called a rewriter. Not that my first drafts are perfect, by any means — I think the main problem is that I like to write, to fiddle with words and phrases at the micro level, during the first draft… as well as hurry-up-and-get-the-story-told, in perhaps something like the way Roz describes her “dreadful” first drafts. So when I hit the revision stage, I’ve got writing which satisfied me to produce, as well as a sorta-kinda story. Because at this point I’m already invested in the words themselves, I subconsciously resist fiddling with anything (like — oh, let’s say — a story; like dramatic values) which might put the words at risk.
A horrible state of affairs.
Anyhow, when I come across a technique like Roz describes — or like some of those in Donald Maas’s Writing the Breakout Novel, for example — I get these stars in my eyes which convince me, briefly, that I am going to be able to feed the unruly story into a machine of some kind. Turn the crank and presto, out the other end comes an incredibly well-crafted story, with rising action, true suspense, all the rest.
(And, of course, exactly the same words. For some reason reality never works like this. They say in an infinite universe, all things are possible. But they’re just being short-sighted. They’re not allowing for me, damn them!)
So then I started thinking of the whole idea of beats. Roz’s posts weren’t the first references to a plot’s beats that I’d ever read, but I did wonder how, exactly, one goes about identifying them. And this got me thinking about the other use of the term, maybe its source: in music.
My dad — who, not incidentally, played drums — absolutely loved swing jazz, in numbers like (say) Benny Goodman’s interpretation of “Sing, Sing, Sing.” His taste never did grow to include, say, bepop jazz (let alone “jazz” as practiced by rock bands like Blood, Sweat, and Tears). As I think about the difference between those two styles of jazz, I think primarily of their rhythms — their beats — as you move from beginning to end of a given number.
The beats of swing jazz are regular, despite the chaotic sense a given song can radiate (as in “Sing, Sing, Sing’s” tumultuous conclusion), and once you “understand” a song’s structure you almost “know” (at least subconsciously) when to expect a drum or bass to go whoomp. Yes, true: once a soloist starts improvising there’s a lot of room for unpredictability. But for the most part, it seems, swing jazz is a product of mechanics.
Bebop, on the other hand, favors unpredictability — surprise. Although you can sense a song’s movement from beginning to end, where exactly the beat or the individual notes will “hit” can be just a matter of conjecture. Bebop is a product of intuition — of organics.
Do you write your stories in an orderly form? Do you revise them that way?
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P.S. A link in this post pointed you to another post where you could hear the three “panels” in a “Sing, Sing, Sing” triptych. I may as well let you hear some bebop, too. This is Charlie Parker’s “Bird of Paradise”:
marta says
I’m so resistant. The smart me would take the time to do this and straighten out the glitches in my work. The real me is just horrified at the idea. Like–wouldn’t it be more fun to count carpet fibers? Really. And the insane me thinks that literature is filled with books not subject to this stuff. I mean, haven’t other writers just written their damn books?
I can feel my brain start to disconnect when I look at these format/plans/beats/et al. Like when I look at theorems.
These things look like great ideas. Maybe this resistance is why I’m not published. I shall beat my head against the wall.
cynth says
I remember writing classes where we looked at other author’s writings and asked ourselves, did he purposefully put this word in there? And why that word? We dissected and discussed ad nauseum each nuanced word or phrase meaning. Geez.
I’m sorry, this is why writing for me is so hard. I start putting words down in what seems to me a way of telling a story. I do NOT analyze each word. And that is why I stop myself. I have not analyzed, dissected or predetermined each word before putting them down. Does this mean they aren’t any good? Or that they don’t have a beat or meaning of their own? I hope not. I cannot do the tiny details while I’m writing. I sometimes go back and add stuff if I think it adds or take stuff out if it detracts. But I will never be Pat Conroy or even Stephen King for that matter, so the dissection of my work probably wouldn’t stand up to the professor’s standards. But I think it tells a story worth telling nonetheless.
Sing, Sing, Sing tells a story, too, in Gene Krupa’s hands, as does Beethoven and Picasso. They are not the same note, but they are still art/music/storytelling.
I know what Marta means. Sometimes we have to just sit down and write and forget the music in the background.
Recaptcha: moral alibiing
Eileen says
I’m a rewriter. I don’t know if I’d apply the term “mechanical” to myself just b/c I’m a rewriter … I’m a little dyslexic (literally not metaphorically) so I do this weird jumpy-jumpy thing when I write the first draft which means that I edit-while-writing even when I don’t want to edit-while-writing just b/c I’m jumping back and forth … if you heard me try to explain something aloud you’d totally understand my jumpy-jumpyness. Anyway. I have to be a rewriter to smooth out my dyslexia inspired way of stringing thoughts together.
Maybe it’s more mechanical than I thought … just a machine that could use an expediter.
“Beats” had me thinking theater. Perhaps theater gets the term from music but I’m guessing this editing article gets the term from theater.
Actors talk about beats all the time and playwrights write them in to tell the actors when to drop an old track in the conversation and start a new — b/c you can’t write in Jim nodded at Jane and dropped the subject of dinner. He wondered about the dog. “Jane do you think the dog is sad?” you’d just write Jim’s line about dinner and then (beat) do you think the dog is sad?
It’s more like the turns within the scene — bebop unexpected or not — sort of like if you had to break the scene into mini-scenes, that would be beats.
If you can actually see the beats in your writing (or other people’s) it’s really great b/c you’ll get to a point where you realize that a beat is completely, ridiculously unimportant, and you can cut the fluff. I’ve had this happen in play rehearsal … and if you’ve got the playwright on hand you might get the beat rewritten, if you don’t the actor and director have to figure out how to use the beat to develop something else that is perhaps in the space/movement/expressions and not in the dialog
DarcKnyt says
I’ve started revising again, and I have to say, I like cutting and chopping and organizing things. I think I have a better handle on how to write now than I did when I started. I like editing as I go, but don’t do it. I like to have a structure, not outline, in mind so the writing itself can be organic.
Like cynth, I don’t pay attention to each word, roll around on the floor convulsing because I can’t decide exactly which word should come next. I won’t do that. I’ll write hot and revise cool, but only to an extent. After that things get dicey. I have to learn when to say it’s finished.
When’s that?
I don’t know, I’ve never reached that point before. I’ll let you know if I ever do. ;)
dirtywhitecandy says
Hi guys! Great discussion! To clarify, the beats are the important changes in the story. All stories need change, and those changes need to build in momentum so that you have more intrigue, mystery and trouble. You need twists so it’s not predictable, and you need to build to a climax. They are the scaffolding that everything else hangs on, but most writers find it impossible to check when all the ‘writing’ is in the way. Hence my stripped down ‘beats’ – which show whether the story is going somewhere, and whether scenes are purposeless.
John says
marta: I think I’m in sorta the same dimension as you — have a very difficult time imagining me doing this right, let alone well; am terrified that that marks me as a careless and/or lazy plotter, unwilling to work hard to make my story as good as possible (all of which, btw, is stuff that always worries me); and think reflexively of great writers who did nothing like this rigorous analysis of their work, didn’t seek out let alone belong to crit groups, attended no writers’ conferences… didn’t even necessarily worry about the difference between “published” and “published well.”
I like reading non-fiction at least as much as I like reading fiction, have had better luck writing the former for publication, and sometimes wonder if I just ought to bag the whole story-telling thing. Non-fiction writers seem much less neurotic about their work than novelists and short-fiction writers.
cynth: Oh, I’m definitely a details rather than a big-picture person when it comes to the actual process of writing. That “why this word instead of another?” sort of question I used to and sometimes still do ask myself while I’m writing or revising. I lapse into these states, probably like trances, in which I stare at a spot vaguely over the center of my computer monitor, because a word or phrase doesn’t seem just right somehow.
And then I “finish” the chapter or paragraph or other unit of work, and suddenly suspect I’ve got a beautiful sparkly pile o’ plot here…
Eileen: When I read things like Roz’s post or your comment, I freak out about how little I know about writing. Even though I’ve been writing fiction for over 20 years, I’ve been flying seat of the pants, so to speak — utterly naive about and suspicious of crazy devices like altimeters, artificial horizons, and air-speed gauges. (Which is defensible only up to the point when someone says, “Yeah, so tell me about what you’ve published…”)
Thanks for explaining the use of the “(beat)” thing in playwriting. I never even suspected (“Duh, Ms. Flight Instructor — what’s THAT gauge for?”) that it denoted a change in direction, even abstract direction — always read it as a timing instruction. As in Wait for a beat or two before proceeding.
(Eerily, the reCaptcha for this comment is “the playgoer” — the universe sending me a very different message than if it had offered “the playwright.”)
Darc: Going back over something in revision is very satisfying for me, too. Now that I can see I’ve got maybe “only” another half-dozen chapters left to write in what’s shaping up to be a 30-chapter WIP, I’m starting to feel eager about applying the separate cheat sheet/to-be-done list I’ve been maintaining as I go back and plug the gaps, and wrench the whole rickety contraption into shape.
I think for my peace of mind — just to satisfy my curiosity, if nothing else — I’m gonna have to do some sort of, um, beat analysis of at least a couple chapters, once I’ve checked off everything on the list and think that this draft of this version is truly done. I have no confidence I’ll even recognize a beat when I stumble over it, and feel a little creeped-out that I’ve been leaving (or not leaving!) them here and there in my work to this point.
Roz/dwc: Thank you so much for stimulating the discussion!
As you can probably tell from my other comments above, you could have called “beats” by their Russian name, whatever it is, and I’d have understood the term about as well as I do now. I recognize that being able to locate them in a story depends on practice — a learned skill rather than an inborn one. And while I doubt I’ve got the patience to map them as rigorously as you do with your beat sheets (great term, btw), I do want to at least grasp the mysterious notion intuitively.
I’d make a lousy doctor. When I look at my story, the one I’m working on or the ones I think I’ve completed, I don’t see a skeleton draped with internal organs, a central nervous system, flesh of various kinds, hair, and so on. I just see a creature. When it’s ailing I just want to give it a couple aspirin and send it to bed, even when I suspect I really ought to consider peeling back the skin and going to work with scalpel, sutures, anesthetic, and a copy of Gray’s Anatomy.
(Aside: Google’s translation service tells me that “the beats are the important changes in the story” translates to “Bieniya vazhnye izmeneniya v istoriyu” in (romanized/non-Cyrillic) Russian.)
Froog says
In my experience, a ‘beat’ in the theatre is an actor’s/director’s term rather than a playwright’s. It’s usually something an actor inserts during the process of developing a personal interpretation of the role – often it’s more a matter of rhythm and pacing than the momentary silence itself being especially fraught with significance.
I think – at least until recently, maybe – it’s been quite rare for writers to include ‘beats’ in their text; and I suppose they’d only do it when it seemed particularly important to them to suggest a pause – or a longer and more significant pause – where it might not have readily occurred to the actor to use one.
‘Changing the subject’ is only one example of what they can do. They provide an opportunity for you to hear the brain-gears grinding for a fraction of a second – and that can be “Gosh, she’s so beautiful, I’m tongue-tied” or “Gee, I’m nearly busted; I’d better think of a good lie” or “Damn, I’m bored and can’t think of what to say next” or any number of things. But sometimes silence – even for half a second – can be more eloquent than words.
Partly, too, it can be an opportunity for the anxious audience to try to fill the silence with their own interpretation of what the character’s thinking. I saw an excellent lecture once on John Ford’s The Searchers in which the speaker pointed out that what was often castigated as John Wayne’s limited acting range was actually great acting for this role: he was so utterly impassive that he became a blank slate on to which everyone could project their own idea of his emotions and motivations.
Harold Pinter was famously one of the first playwrights to make a big thing of including ‘beats’ in his stage direction. I happened to read a very interesting critical article about this a few years ago, but never knew where it was from or who it was by (it was one of the very rare stimulating items that I get to read in my voice recording work in China; but Chinese publishers seldom include attributions!). Pinter made a pointed distinction between a ‘pause’, which was a brief hesitation (though, in his plays, even the smallest holes could allow for a torrent of awkwardness and embarrassment to be poured into them), and a ‘silence’, which was a more protracted and devastating suspension of conversation.
As in….
He: You don’t love me, then?
(Pause)
She: No.
(Silence)
John says
Froog: Pinter — perfectly apropos reference! A Wikipedia article on “Characteristics of Harold Pinter’s work” has much to say about this, including this hilarious quote from Pinter himself:
(The same article briefly discusses the phrase “the comedy of menace” to characterize Pinter’s work, and cites another — later repudiated — line from him, in which he described his work as being about “the weasel under the cocktail cabinet.” Which is a pretty funny line.)