Say you’re developing a book and need to see structure. It’s easy to find advice about book structure which mentions beats. Beats are essential in the guidebooks from Jessica Brody (Save the Cat Writes a Novel, Save the Cat Writes a Young Adult Novel).
But what is a beat, anyway? A story beat can be anything, even an interlude of character backstory. Pushing the book forward is not the best mission for backstory. After all, that’s why it’s called backstory. Beats can be parts of an assembly line of plot events. As authors, we should supply a motivation for each event.
AI note: I don’t want to spend my time altering an AI collaboration engine’s first takes on character motives. I love dreaming up characters. The model-bots, as I call AI, do much better when you feed the bot your book’s beats.
That’s like asking someone for the exact times on the clock to flip a steak on the grill to get it medium rare. Sometimes an AI bot will ask for some number of beats per chapter. Imagine how much prescience it will demand of you to see all those turning points, without actually writing the chapter.
Insert humanity Here
You might as well write the first draft. I offer that advice all the time, even as hard as a first draft is for me. An editor or a sharp beta reader then comprehends my first attempt. Their outside eyes give me understanding of what I’m attempting, as well as how well I’m achieving my goals for each chapter and the whole book.
Can they believe it? Structure can be the weakest part of MFA training. It’s the hardest part of novel writing for me, because as a writer who started a journalist, anything seems possible. Forcing a story’s events to fit my first take on my logic strains my level of disbelief.
What’s a level of disbelief? Amanda Reynolds at The Novelry tells us, “we ask our readers to buy into this suspension when we begin crafting a fictional story. Readers can implicitly recognize that the story is not real — just as we all know the difference between a documentary telling a true story and an acted drama.”
In short, a story needs to be true enough to keep reading. Motivations build a case for story and character choices. For a novel, we all need to keep that level of disbelief low, so readers can believe one reaction or event after another can happen. For me, that comes back to motivations. My foundation is always character work and backstory. In journalism stories, we could just skip that and say, “Well, it happened.”
I dislike changing my mind during revisions about these things. Well, I dislike it when nobody else has seen the writing. That’s why I rely on an editor to call me on weak logic. That weakness can rob me of dramatic narrative power. Also, my challenge is to let readers fill in the gaps by following my subtext: the writing that suggests but does not tell flat-out. Subtext is just flat-out fiction magic, an active role for the reader to play.
