The Beat Sheet returns a JSON with all the beats and where they should appear in your story. The beats are from the Blake Snyder Beat Sheet or the "BS2" which includes the 15 essential "beats" or plot points that all stories should contain, according to the Blake Snyder beat sheet from his book Save The Cat!.
It also includes additions from Save The Cat! Strikes Back:
- The stasis=death beat is added.
- The five-point finale beats are added.
To better suit novels and short stories there's an option to generate a different beat sheet to use for fiction.
Include beatsheet.min.js on your page, then use:
var output = beatsheet(100,'fiction');
In this example, beatsheet takes two parameters:
- The projected number of pages (or words). If you are writing a 400 pages long novel use 400, if you're writing 90000 words, use 90000.
- The type of beat sheet you'd like to calculate. You can select between the original
bs2andfiction.
The output is a JSON with all the beats and their page/word count:
[{"title":"The opening image","begin":1,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Theme Stated","begin":4,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Set-up","begin":1,"end":8},{"title":"Statis=Death","begin":9,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Catalyst","begin":10,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Debate","begin":10,"end":20},{"title":"Break into two","begin":20,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"B-story","begin":24,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Fun and Games","begin":24,"end":50},{"title":"Midpoint","begin":50,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Bad Guys close in","begin":50,"end":68},{"title":"All Is Lost","begin":68,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Dark Night of the Soul","begin":68,"end":77},{"title":"Break Into Three","begin":77,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Gathering the team","begin":81,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Executing the Plan","begin":85,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"The Height Tower Surprise","begin":89,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Dig, Deep Down","begin":93,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"The Execution of the New Plan","begin":97,"end":"NULL"},{"title":"Final Image","begin":100,"end":"NULL"}]
This is the original Blake Snyder Beat Sheet or the "BS2".
To better suit novels and short stories the first act is a bit shorter, based on input from Plot & Stucture (James Scott Bell). The reasoning behind this is that a written text demands more involvement from the reader than a movie that you can just sit back and watch, hence we must involve the reader sooner.
Compared to the original BS2 beat sheet the following is made:
- The length of act 1 is 1/5 of the total length.
Modern browsers, and IE9+.
0.1.3 (2013/06/14) Can generate the original bs2 beat sheet
0.1.2 (2013/06/09) Better lint and minification
0.1.1 (2013/05/11) Adds Karma for browser testing
0.1.0 (2013/02/10) Initial release
Blake Snyder, for the BS2.
Beatsheet is freely distributable under the terms of the MIT license.
Copyright (c) 2013 David Litmark
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