The six beats are a functional taxonomy: each names a job, not a quantity of prose, so one beat may take four pages or four words, and one sentence may do two. What the taxonomy offers is a set of separate questions with separate remedies, which turns make this chapter better into something a writer can act on. Its characteristic misuse is as a template for drafting. Filled in beat by beat, it produces competent and lifeless prose, because it describes the skeleton of a working scene, and a skeleton assembled first and clothed afterwards has the proportions of a diagram. Read it backwards, on a finished draft. For each beat below the question is what it buys, what carries it, how it fails, and what it looks like compressed to almost nothing, since in accomplished fiction that is how it usually appears.
Goal
A goal is a concrete, immediate objective, legible to the reader before the resistance begins and specific enough that the reader can tell whether it has been achieved. It buys a yardstick. Tension comes from an outcome the reader can score rather than from danger, which is why a fight between strangers is merely fast and a conversation in which someone is trying not to cry is tense. Two distinctions do most of the work in revision. A story goal (find out what my father was hiding) cannot be pursued in a room, while a scene goal (get Dov to say why the locks were changed) can; drafts that feel unfocused often have a clear story goal and no scene goals. And a goal is something the character is doing something about now, whereas a wish is only a preferred state of affairs.
The strongest carrier is descent from the previous decision, so that the goal arrives already motivated. Andy Weir’s The Martian (2011) shows the plainest form: its astronaut, stranded alone on Mars, sizes each goal to a day (make water, grow food, reach the old Pathfinder lander to talk to Earth) and logs it before he starts, so the reader can score every entry. A goal fails when it is unstated, when it is diffuse (she wanted things to be better between them, which nothing can count against), when it is announced to someone who does not need telling, and when a paragraph of motive precedes a small objective. Compressed, a goal is an action in progress, since a character picking a lock needs no sentence of intention. The test is whether the reader could say what the character would count as success in the next ninety seconds.
Conflict
Conflict is the resistance the goal meets, and its job is to change the shape of the goal rather than postpone it. Resistance earns its pages when it is informative. Three locked doors in a row are one obstacle told three times; a door that is locked, a second locked from the inside and a third recently oiled are an escalation, because each yields a fact and narrows the interpretation. Stephen King’s 11/22/63 (2011) makes the principle its premise. Its time traveller finds that the past is “obdurate” and resists change in proportion to how much the change matters, so that small alterations cost little and the attempt to prevent the Kennedy assassination brings accidents and illness. Every obstacle tells him, and the reader, how large the thing he is attempting is.
Internal conflict, a character resisting their own goal, is weak when it stays a mood and strong when it is converted into small external choices. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Stevens in The Remains of the Day (1989) is never slack because his reluctance keeps surfacing as a visible decision: whether to take the trip, whether to raise a subject. Conflict fails when an obstacle yields at the first push, when delay leaves the character unchanged, or when resistance is so total that the character has nothing to try. It compresses least of the six beats, since it is what supplies duration; its one legitimate compression is dramatic irony, in which a reader who knows what the questioner does not feels the resistance in every polite sentence.
Disaster
A disaster is the unit’s terminal state, and it buys the sequel: without it there is nothing for reaction, dilemma or decision to be about. It takes three shapes, which the table sets side by side with what each leaves the sequel to do.
| Shape | Formula | What the sequel is about |
|---|---|---|
| Costed success | Yes, but | What the cost has made impossible |
| Compounded failure | No, and furthermore | Shock, and fewer options than before |
| Poisoned success | Yes, and that is the problem | Recognition; the dilemma concerns the self |
The costed success is the shape drafts tend to miss, because a character holding what they came for looks like a winner: Elena leaves the doorway holding the key she came for, and has spent trust she did not know she was spending. The compounded failure can reach backwards, as the interrupted wedding in chapter 26 of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) does when it voids the marriage and explains a year of the household’s strangeness at once. The poisoned success is the literary tradition’s characteristic disaster, in which a goal is achieved and revealed to have been the wrong goal; it lets a novel change its subject without changing its plot. The cheapest carrier is a refusal or a silence, since it costs the writer no event at all. A disaster fails as the clean win, as a cost no one registers, as inflation in which each unit must end bigger than the last, and as a calamity from outside the action. What matters is the change in the character’s options, not the size of the event. Compressed, a disaster is a single priced object, such as a coat brushed again since the last visit, which is why The Descriptive Detail (Chapter 4) is this chapter’s partner.
Reaction
Reaction is the character’s registration of the disaster, given room in proportion to its weight. It buys permission, since readers take their emotional cue from the text’s own pacing and a catastrophe passed over in a clause did not matter; characterisation under pressure, since reaction is involuntary and therefore more revealing than any decision; and conversion, since it is the beat in which an outside event becomes an inner state, the only form in which it can motivate a choice. Reaction is best rendered by what the body does and what the attention selects. A named emotion (she was furious) is a summary of the beat and does not perform its conversion. The exception is retrospective first person, where the naming is an act of the older narrator: Pip in Great Expectations (1861) names his shame at length, years after the event, and the gap between the boy’s disordered perception and the man’s naming is the book. Reaction fails when it is skipped, when every character absorbs every blow with the same brief composure, when it runs past the point of new information, and when a small setback is given a catastrophe’s vocabulary. Compressed, it is a changed verb: she didn’t wait to see if he’d follow carries the feeling in the refusal.
Dilemma
A dilemma is the weighing of two or more courses, each with a real cost, none obviously right. It is the only beat that invites the reader to reach a view before the character does, and a reader with a view is invested in the outcome. It has two requirements. Its costs must be comparable, so the remedy for a lopsided dilemma is to write the two costs, one sentence each, before writing the options; and its options must be available to the character, or the beat is a lament. In chapter 27 of Jane Eyre Brontë gives the option Jane will refuse the better speeches, and the departure costs something because of it. Real deliberation is uneven, since people spend most of their time arguing against what they are about to do. A dilemma fails when one option is plainly right, when neither cost is named, and when it repeats without adding a consideration. Compressed, it is one rejected option: She could have called their mother, which implies the alternative and a reason in a clause.
Decision
A decision is a commitment to a new, concrete objective, arising from the dilemma and specific enough to become the next scene’s goal. It buys the chain itself. A decision needs concreteness (she would open the register drawer names an object a scene can start from; she resolved to find the truth does not) and some degree of irreversibility, since a choice the character could drop between chapters at no cost is a preference. The strongest carrier is an action taken at once, as when Jane leaves Thornfield before dawn with almost nothing. A decision fails when the next scene reveals a choice never made on the page, when it is too abstract to yield a goal, and when it is announced and then explained. Compressed, it is a verb of motion in the next sentence, since arriving somewhere is deciding to go there; but the fact of a decision cannot be compressed away.
Must all six be present?
No. The beats are functions spread across a sequence, not slots in each unit: a disaster may be registered three chapters later, by another character, as Septimus Smith’s death is registered by Clarissa in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). Some beats are unavailable in some books, since a person without options cannot decide. And the proportions are a matter of register: a thriller compresses the sequel and expands the scene, and a novel of consciousness does the reverse. The question in revision is never whether a beat is missing but whether its absence is deliberate, and whether the reader has what they need to cross the gap.
See also: the Reference taxonomy, with each beat’s carriers and failures in tables and a summary table of all six; The Viewpoint Shift (Chapter 13), on the viewpoint arrangements that put the reader ahead of a character.