Nail Your Novel: A Beat Sheet

Troubleshoot your first draft in one pass

Your first draft is probably a bit rough and chaotic, right? You know there are lots of things you need to fix. Where do you start?

The obvious way might seem to be to start at the beginning and feel your way. But I find if I do that, I don’t really have control. I might sort out the flow and the language, but I’m still not tackling the structure, or knowing if the pace is varied enough (or if it varies too much), if the crescendos build and are in the right places or if some of my threads disappear. Indeed, some characters may fade off into the background and never return to complete their stories! Or other story threads may prove to be irrelevant and should be saved for another book.
But there’s a smarter way to manage it all at once. And get much more out of the story. I call it –

the beat sheet.

The beat sheet is a document that assesses the entire manuscript in as summarised a form as possible. Hollywood scriptwriters do something similar with screenplays. Not only does the beat sheet allow you to assess your draft at a glance, it can be used as a mission statement for your revisions.

I’ve used it for short novellas and big, sprawling literary epics. It makes the most daunting revision job a piece of cake, no matter how long or complex the book is. And it’s even quite fun to do.

You write a short summary of each scene, assessing its purpose in the story. You use coloured pens for each story thread or group of characters, emoticons as shorthand for the mood of a scene, leave a column down the side so that you can work out the timeline with pinpoint accuracy. You use another colour to draw in where you’re going to swap scenes around, add new ones in, or adjust the content.

Preparing this document might take you a day or two, and the result might look like childish scribble. But I promise you, it’s a seriously useful piece of work.

You can make all sorts of creative decisions with the beat sheet. For instance, the emoticons might indicate you’ve got too much tension building – so you might rework the order of scenes to give the reader a breather. Or you might rewrite one of the tense scenes to make it lighter. You might feel the narrative has got bogged down in a repetitive loop – and looking at the beat sheet will show you where you can trim the flab.

You can use it to assess character development too – as you will see from the emoticons and your summary of the scenes if your people are being put under more pressure and changing the way they behave.

Another great thing about the beat sheet is it also puts me in a positive frame of mind about my first draft. Any problems I come across, I put on the beat sheet and figure out what to do about them. Quite often, it will be clear whether I need to reorder, delete – or maybe expand.

Once I’ve played with the story on the beat sheet, I’m confident it will work on a structural level. Then I can dive in and edit with purpose and pleasure. I know where I’m going and I’ve got all the information I need to bring the best out of the story.

That’s basically it in a nutshell, but you can find more detail at The Beat Sheet – Your at-a-glance revision blueprint.

Roz Morris has nearly a dozen novels in print. She critiques for a leading London literary consultancy and blogs at www.nailyournovel.com Inspiration and Creative Provocation For Writers and is on Twitter at @dirtywhitecandy. The beat sheet is one of the tools in her book Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books and How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence http://www.dirtywhitecandy.com/archives/202 available in paperback £5.99 or as a FREE downloadable ebook www.nailyournovel.com