Get the File: Part 3

Use beats to move your character through a task.

A beat is a flexible term that can be used at various levels of abstraction when thinking about a story. 

You can refer to beats at the levels of story, act, chapter, and scene.

Up in the clouds, looking over the terrain of your whole story, you can identify entire chapters that rise up like mountains to function as beats. Dropping to the level of acts, you can identify foothills within chapters that function as beats. And on the ground, at the level of a scene, you can identify beats that are like forks in the road, falling rocks, and rushing rapids, that your hero confronts as they move through a task.

In this entry, Part 3, I’m talking about my experience using beats to move my characters through a task I’ve set out for them within the span of a chapter.

Screenwriters think in terms of scenes and sequences. As a novelist, I tend to think in terms of chapters. This is a generalization for now.

So here I’m blocking out the beats for the chapter “Get the File.” Consider these beats as tools, not as steps in a rigid template. I add to them and change them at will as my chapters or scenes necessitate. Recall that we’re going from negative (-) to positive (+) in terms of tracking the relative progress of the hero.

FIRST IMAGE (-): Holly closes her car door. It’s late afternoon, and the parking lot is full of cars. She walks across the parking lot to the law firm.

SETUP DESIRE: Holly stops at the glass doors as people stream out. She holds the door for them. They are dressed in professional clothes more expensive than her own. She smiles, but no one acknowledges her. Before entering, she takes a deep breath. She wants the file. She waits patiently in the nice lobby, sitting beside a potted fern—she follows all the rules—before she is called into Andrea’s office.

FIRST ATTEMPT: Holly enters Andrea’s office and spots a pen on the floor. She picks it up and returns the pen to the cup of pens on Andrea’s desk. Holly sits and politely asks Andrea for the file. This action is in keeping with Holly’s character. A nice person, Holly is nervous and trying her best. Andrea is a strong antagonist: a tough lawyer. Holly is on Andrea’s turf and is clearly the underdog.

CATALYST: Andrea sizes up Holly as a pushover and refuses to give her the file.

DILEMMA: Andrea’s initial refusal functions as a catalyst in this scene because it forces Holly into a dilemma. How can Holly get the file from Andrea without breaking a rule and getting in worse trouble?

DEBATE 1: Holly is still a good person here, and she uses persuasive strategies that are appropriate, although she’s pushing the boundaries of her character. Holly uses logic. 

DEBATE 2: When using logic fails, Holly expresses urgency. This is getting fun, for us readers, because it’s getting tense for Holly. She’s not used to being under pressure in this kind of situation. It’s unusual for Holly to make a scene, and we’re paying attention to how she manages the pressure. We’re seeing new sides of Holly.

DEBATE 3: When urgency fails to move Andrea, Holly prevails on Andrea’s sense of justice. With each new attempt (however many attempts you as writer care to have Holly make), Holly is pushing against the bounds of her character (being forced to do so in reaction to resistance from the antagonist). Holly is growing by small steps. 

These debate beats refer to the debate about whether or not Holly’s strategies will succeed in her getting the file from Andrea. People don’t like to change, and Holly is no different. So her initial strategies are typical for her, but these strategies fail. Holly’s frustrated and pushes herself beyond her comfort zone.

MIDPOINT: Holly gets up and moves to the door, to leave the office in defeat, but no, she stops and gathers her courage. She turns and threatens Andrea. Holly’s definitely crossing a line here. This might be considered the midpoint of this chapter. It’s here that we cross over from Old Holly to New Holly. There’s no turning back. Hero and antagonist face each other and know each other for what they are. Their motives are exposed now, and the antagonist (a lawyer, after all, versed in argument) prevails, which pushes Holly toward the . . .

DEATH MOMENT: Holly fails to get the file from Andrea, and now Andrea is suspicious of Holly. Holly is worse off than she was at the start of the scene. Holly ducks into a conference room. She regrets her naivete in thinking she could pull this off so easily. This death beat is metaphorical: it refers to the death of Holly’s original self at the start of the scene. It’s painful for people to realize they are inadequate to a given task. Holly regrets getting herself into this tough spot, which includes the challenge to grow. If she wants the file, Holly can’t rely on who she’s been.

PROCESS: Holly has to process her failure. People enter the conference room, which drives her to rush out into the hallway. She hides in a supply closet. She’s nervous that she angered Andrea, and she’s upset with herself for making an explicit threat. She’s processing these new feelings, meaning she has to live with them and decide whether or not to continue pursuing her goal. What kind of person is she willing to become to get what she wants?

SPARK: I call this beat a spark because it’s something that lights a fire in the hero to take next-level action. When writing a novel, as opposed to a script, you can just type out the internal arguments the hero is having with herself, but it isn’t very dramatic. If you were watching this character, you’d be watching them stand there and do nothing.

A spark, then, is something you can see or hear. It’s an object, a symbol, an event, an overheard bit of dialogue, a look on someone’s face—something small but significant that shows us (viewer or reader) that the hero has resolved to take the next step. 

If you’re desperate to move the hero to take an action that’s a big leap for their character, you might have the spark be a reminder of what’s at stake with a deadline attached to it. 

For example, Holly, still stuck in the supply closet, could receive a text from some nefarious person to get that file now, or else bad things will happen. Of course, a text from a bad guy is lazy and heavy-handed. “I need Holly to know she needs to get that file now,” thinks the novelist. “Okay, so a bad guy texts her, ‘Get that file now.’” Yeah. Ugh. 

I’d prefer a dramatic moment in which the reader can participate with their imagination. If Holly had to get this file to save her kidnapped daughter, you might be able to skip the text from the bad guy (which does not require any imagination on the part of the reader) and have Holly find an item in her bag or pocket that belongs to her daughter. Seeing her daughter’s giraffe bracelet or yellow hair band would be enough to remind Holly of why she’s pushing herself beyond her limits to get that file. And upon seeing that symbolic object, the reader can put two and two together and participate with the hero in that moment of resolve.

If the stakes are not nearly as high as the rescue of a kidnapped daughter, you can have Holly come across, in her bag or pocket, an object with a different significance, perhaps one that reminds her, painfully, of a life she is trying to escape. Or Holly could overhear someone in the hall being berated by a superior, and in that flash of self-awareness, Holly resolves not to be a pushover anymore.

CHOICE: Whatever the spark, Holly resolves to break a rule. This is what is most difficult for her to do. A rule-breaker is not the kind of person she’s been in her life up to this point, but she’ll have to become someone new, the kind of Holly who breaks a rule to get what she wants. She’s already made a threat and hidden herself in the law firm. So she’ll take the next step and steal the file.

ACT: Holly sneaks out of the supply closet at night, searches the office, and confronts Andrea to steal the file.

SHOWDOWN: They fight. Typically, there is a moment in a fight scene when the antagonist gives the hero a chance to give up and walk away and forget this ever happened. Holly considers this opportunity to go back to Old Holly . . . but then New Holly fights back with even more vigor. Holly adapts to her surroundings, sees a civil-procedure casebook on a shelf behind her, grabs it, and swings it at Andrea. New Holly does not follow civil procedure anymore.

CONSEQUENCE: Sometimes the consequence is unexpected, a third option, if you will, to the outcome of the showdown. In our scene, however, I’m keeping it simple. Holly has the file, but now she’s a thief and on the run.

The consequence beat could also be called the cost. Nothing’s for free, and the hero has to pay a price for moving forward. A hero’s willingness to pay the price proves the strength of the hero’s desire. This is what forces a character’s growth: the hero must decide what is most valuable to them in the moment and accept compromise (a cost) to move forward. To get what she wanted, Holly crossed a moral line as well as roused the likelihood of retaliation from the antagonists.

FINAL IMAGE (+): Holly—cut and bleeding, yes, but with the file in her bag—sprints alone across the empty parking lot at night.

Okay, now that’s a chapter with significant drama. Compare it with where we started back in Part 1, which was a generic interaction with no character change. Using -/+ notations and beats, we’ve created an exciting chapter, and we’ve seen Holly change as a person.

Here’s something quick to consider.

Notice what happens if you look only at the first image and the final image of this chapter.

FIRST IMAGE: At the start, we see Holly, nervous in nice clothes, cross a crowded parking lot, in daytime, to enter the law firm.

FINAL IMAGE: Cut to the end, and we’ve jumped in time to see Holly, disheveled and frantic but with the file in hand, sprinting away from the law firm, at night, across the empty parking lot.

We’ve totally cut out the middle. We don’t know what happened inside the law firm, but we can guess. Seeing only these two moments, we can infer that what happened in between them is that Holly got into a fight in order to steal the file.

It’s amazing what our minds can do to fill in the blanks. We have the beginning and the end, and we can infer the middle. As a writer, you can do this—show only these two before-and-after moments—but note the effect. It verges on the comic. It’s kind of funny, especially because we’re detached from Holly’s experience. You can almost hear the soundtrack. We’re dangerously close to laughing at her, not feeling with her. And we don’t know anything about her antagonist (who must therefore not be important to the story) or Holly’s self-reflective moments of transformation within that scene. Holly grew, but by jumping from the first image to the last, we did not share that experience with her.

How you handle the beats of your scenes will depend on what you want to achieve within each scene. You can skip beats, rearrange them, emphasize certain ones over others, and so on. You can be artistic, playful, patient, or insistent. And you can change your strategies from chapter to chapter. I often vary my strategies to keep up my own interest as I write.

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