0:11 Blake Snyder's 'Beat Sheet' 0:35 Opening Image 0:52 Set-Up 1:02 Theme Stated 1:38 Catalyst 1:49 Debate 2:02 Break into Two 2:41 B Story 3:01 Fun. After training directly with Blake Snyder in both his beat sheet workshops and master classes, filmmaker Jennifer Zhang wrote, produced, and sold her first award-winning feature film (The Evil Inside). Jennifer's 2020 pandemic feature, Charon, has been accepted in such film festivals as IndieFEST.
Have you heard of Blake Snyder? He was a screenwriter and writer of several terrific books about screenwriting (tragically he died in 2009 at fifty-one) includingSaveThe Cat! (23 printings so far) and Save the Cat Goes To The Movies. Highly recommended.
Blake Snyder was famous for his “beat sheet.” This was his original, funny, idiosyncratic (and very insightful) way of breaking down a story into its constituent elements. There are fifteen beats in the Blake Snyder beat sheet, starting with “Opening Image” and continuing through “Set-up,” “Catalyst,” “B Story,” “Bad Guys Close In,” “Dark Night of the Soul,” etc.
Number Eight is “Fun and Games.”
Here [writes Blake] we forget plot and enjoy “set pieces” and “trailer moments” and revel in the “promise of the premise.”
The Fun and Games part of the story, according to Blake Snyder, begins around the start of Act Two in a movie (for books, say simply “the middle”) and can continue most of the way to Act Three.
What exactly are Fun and Games?
They’re what we go to a specific movie (or read a specific book) for.
We go to a Terminator movie to see Arnold Schwarzenegger destroy things. We go to a Hitchcock flick for the scares and the Icy Blonde in Jeopardy scenes. We read Philip Roth for upscale Jewish angst (and sex) and we pick up Malcolm Gladwell for quirky but profound insights into common but often-overlooked phenomena.
The Fun and Games of a historical romance are the bodice-ripping love scenes. The Fun and Games of a musical are the songs. The Fun and Games of a French restaurant are the gorgeous veggies, the meats and fish roasted with pounds of butter, and the impeccable complementary wines.
A case could be made that the plot of any novel or drama or epic saga, back as far as Beowulf and the Iliad, is nothing grander than a vehicle to deliver the Fun and Games.
And that the writer’s first job, before the application of any and all literary pretensions, is simply to make the Fun and Games work.
Consider Begin Again, the Keira Knightley-Mark Ruffalo-Adam Levine movie I was talking about in a post a couple of weeks ago. Begin Again is (more or less) a musical. The Fun and Games are the songs. Writer-director John Carney had, I don’t know, eight or ten tunes that he had to weave into the story. I’d be very surprised if he didn’t sit down with a notebook and ask himself:
1. How am I going to work each of these songs into the film?
2. Which characters sing them? And why?
3. How can I make each song serve and advance the story?
4. How can I make each song serve the story differently from every other?
5. In what order do I put the songs?
In other words, John Carney began with the Fun and Games. His task was to make them work in the story.
I gotta say, he did a tremendous job. For one song he had Keira Knightley, sitting alone at night in a New York apartment, open her laptop and watch a private video of herself singing for Adam Levine (her boyfriend in the movie) a song she had just written, asking him if he liked it, if he thought it was a good song. Tone of scene: wistful, romantic. Message: she loves him.
In another scene, Carney had Adam Levine play back a song for Keira on his iPhone (a song he had just written during a week out of town.) Twist: Keira realizes as she’s listening to the song that Adam wrote it for another girl. Upshot: she slaps his face and bolts.
What made the task of integrating these Fun and Games particularly daunting for John Carney was that only one or two of the songs had lyrics that referred overtly to what was happening in the moment in the story. They weren’t like “Willkommen” or “What I Did For Love.” They were just generic love songs, like you’d find on any album.
Why am I bringing all this up? I’m flashing back to last week’s post, Learning the Craft. In that post I suggested that it would be a tremendously helpful exercise for all of us to ask ourselves, “What is our craft? What are our strengths as writers? What is unique to us stylistically, thematically, dramatically?”
Same for Fun and Games.
What are our Fun and Games? Even if we’re as-yet unpublished. Even if we’ve only written one story, or just part of a story. What would a reader pick up our book for? What boring parts would she page through to get to the “good parts?”
What are our “good parts?”
The reason I suggest his exercise is because most of us have no idea what our Fun and Games are. I didn’t for years.
If someone were plunking down money to buy a book by you, what would they be buying it to get? What scenes or moments would they want to see? A certain kind of love scene? A trademark type of action or suspense? Are they licking their chops to read your brilliant excursus on American foreign policy? Are they seeking your insights on the evolution of women’s political consciousness in the 1970s?
It’s tremendously helpful to know the answers, to know what our Fun and Games are, because:
1. They tell us what our strengths are.
2. They identify what’s fun for us, what types of scenes we gravitate to.
3. They provide insight into what themes preoccupy us. (Our Fun and Games will instinctively support our themes, consciously or unconsciously.)
Blake Snyder Beat Sheet 2
4. They help us answer the question, “Why do we write?”
5. They give us insight into who we are, long-term, in the sense of our evolving journey as artists and as human beings.
6. And they help us understand what issues are preoccupying us now, today, in this immediate moment of our lives.
Blake Snyder Death
What are your “trailer moments?” What are your “set-pieces?”
What are your Fun and Games?
[P.S. Check out Blake Snyder. Well worth reading.]
About the same time I revisted the BS2, Jami Gold posted an excellent article about using beat sheets with Scrivener. What I liked most about the article was the idea of using the target word count for individual chapters and scenes to lay out the beats.
I don’t know about you, but when it comes to word counts, I find big numbers like 100k pretty intimidating. One of the beauties of the beat sheet is that it breaks down these numbers into manageable chunks. For a 100k-word novel, however, some of those chunks are still 25k words, so I took the idea one step further, with Scrivener.
Blake Snyder Beat Sheet Famous Movies
Before we get started
I’m assuming that you have used, or are at least familiar with, beat sheets and how they work. If you’re not, this post may be a little confusing and I recommend reading Jami Gold’s Beat Sheets 101 post, or Blake Snyder’s book Save the Cat.
If you’re familiar with beat sheets but aren’t sure what your word count should be, trying aiming for your genre’s average. If you’re writing an obscure sub-genre or a mashup, try googling “average word count [your genre]”.
Example: average word count space opera
Breaking the beat sheet into chapters
For most, your chapters are going to be shorter than your beats, and using them to break up the larger chunks of the beat sheet is fairly straight-forward. When you set up a new project in Scrivener, instead of creating folders to reflect the individual beats (opening image, turning point, catalyst, etc), create as many chapters as you think will have in your final novel.
How do you decide how many chapters your finished novel might have? Good question. Easy answer. Find a few novels in your genre and count the number of chapters. Come up with an average and that’s how many chapters you should create.
Example: For my space opera novel, I used Elizabeth Moon’s Vatta’s War series, which has roughly 25 chapters per book
After that, the word goal per chapter is even easier, just divide your total word goal by the number of chapters.
Example: In my case it was 100k words / 25 chapters = 4000 words per chapter.
It’s important to remember that the chapters you’re adding now, and their associated word targets, are approximations. Your story will be as long or a short as it needs to be and, in all likelihood, you’ll add and delete chapters as writing progresses. Right now, they’re just there to help you break your story into smaller, more manageable chunks.
TIP: Creating chapters with word targets, the easy way
By default, when you create a new document in Scrivener’s Draft/Manuscript folder (where you’ll do all of your writing), it creates a new file or Scene. You have to preform a few extra steps (or just remember the shortcut) to create folders, and then there are even more steps to assign a word target to each new folder.
Thankfully, there’s an easier way, all you have to do is create a new default subdocument type. Here’s how.
- Create a new folder in the Templates folder, name it ‘Chapter’ or ‘Bob’ or, really, whatever takes your fancy
- Switch the view to Outline (View -> Outline or cmd+3)
- Add the Target column to the outline (View -> Outliner Columns -> Target). If it’s already in your Outline view, it will have a tick next to it
- Enter the word target per chapter in the Target column
- Select the Draft/Manuscript folder
- Change it’s default subdocument type to the folder you just created in Templates (Documents -> Default New Subdocument Type -> [the folder you created]).
That’s it! Now all you have to do is hit cmd+N to create as many chapters as you need.
Assigning chapters and scenes to beats
At this point, you’ll note that the beats don’t fit nicely into chapters; some, like Act II and Midpoint, don’t even have word counts, while Setup overlaps with Opening Image and Theme Stated. The key here, is to be flexible and not get caught up in exact numbers.
If mapping out the beats seems a little daunting; using the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet: 7-point system redux template, try mapping out the stages (using the Stages column) first. Using labels, and the words per beat column, roughly map out the number of chapters in each stage by dividing the total word count for each stage by the number of words per chapter.
Example: Turning point 1 = 13,650 words / 4000 words per chapter = 3.4 chapters
For those awkward numbers with decimal points, try rounding the number up or down to the nearest whole number.
Example:
Turning point 1 (rounded to the nearest whole number) = 3 chapters
Act II Part 1 = 6.825 chapters = 7 chapters (when rounded)
For the next part, you will need to add scenes to your chapters.
As you did with the Stages, go back through the beat sheet and divide the beats into chapters. Take a closer look at the screenshot above, and you will note that I haven’t named my chapters after my beats, I’ve named the scenes within them instead.
Assigning your beats to scenes instead of chapters just makes the whole process easier. For one, some beats, such as Opening Image at 1000 words, are shorter than a chapter, and others, like Theme Stated, don’t have a word count at all (I gave them a default target of 1000 words). The other, longer beats (Debate, B-Story) can be slotted in around these and between chapters and you can vary the word goal of each, as needed.
Example:
- Chapter 12
- Fun & Games (4000 words)
- Chapter 13
- Fun & Games (3000 words)
- Midpoint (1000 words)
- Chapter 14
- Bad Guys Close In (4000 words)
You’ll need to do some more creative thinking, and a little massaging of scenes and chapters, to get the beat sheet to fit just right, but that’s part of the fun.
What’s next?
That all depends on you. If you’re feeling plannery, you can try outlining your chapters and scenes, but if you’re feeling more panster-ish, dive right on in and start writing that 100k-word sucker.