Hi

Please can someone explain 'beats' to me and also advise how to make a piece of writing more exciting.

What can a writer do to make it more likely someone will want to read on? I am referring to writing style rather than the plot.

Thanks

Sharley

I'm only aware of 'beats' as used in screenplays when a 'beat' means a moment's pause between sections of dialogue, is that what you mean?

With regards to making writing 'more exciting' I think that depends on what you mean by 'more exciting' and that depends on genre, I suppose.

Big subject, hard to know where to start. But I suppose more incident and the sort that ratchets up tension is what you'd want.

I never know what 'beats' are - I think it's a term imported from screenwriting. As to exciting writing, I'd suggest tackling

Showing and Telling

Psychic Distance

Voice

Sentence Structure - both length and order

Blog posts on all of these here, in case it helps:

http://emmadarwin.typepad.com/thisitchofwriting/resources.html

Emma

<Added>

Realise I sort-of know what beats are, but it depends on what medium and tradition you're thinking in:

in conventional acting, it's a pause in or after a speech, while something someone's said sinks in. Pinter's the specialist.

in Stanislavski, as I remember from reading him a million years ago, it's the unit of action in which the actor conceives an intention and that intention animates what happens.

I think in screenwriting it's not unlike the latter: a unit of action: X sees the knife, thinks about it, picks it up, goes out of the house [to find cheating boyfriend]... But I could well be wrong about that.

On the subject of exciting writing, I went to a really good talk last year by a writer who used to be on this site - Chevalier.

She is a screenwriter turned novelist and she talked about narrative drive, which she described as being linked to the desires you plant in the reader's head. I am probably mis-quoting, but the general gist was that you should work towards creating a goal on every page. It can be a very small goal - for example, you want the hero to touch the heroine's hand - and of course, you can always thwart it, but you need to be aware that you are creating this desire for a certain thing to happen so that the reader has to stay with you, to see if it does.

Does that make any sense at all? It did when she explained it.

Saturday, I think that makes lots of sense, and it's so true - it's the old goals/obstacles thing: what does he want, how does he try to get it, what gets in the way.

Very relevant to Stanislavski, too: the basic was of working on a speech is to decide what the 'intention' is: i.e. a verb: to persuade, to seduce, to block, to annoy... And you then play that speech/scene in order to achieve that - only of course other characters' intentions get in the way (and I love the way that intentions connect with the writerly business of getting the right verb because it's the biggest thing which makes writing vivid and energetic, or not)

Emma

A beat is like a small scene, I think. I think what Saturday says is right.

I understand 'beats' as pauses, but significant pauses. The kind of moment you allow to let the meaning from the previous sentence sink in. Like, here's something without a beat:

'I killed her,' he said.
'Did you?' I asked.

And this one has a beat:

'I killed her,' he said.
I sat down, fixed my eyes on the tree at the end of the garden, on the fields beyond.
'Did you?' I asked.

Susiex

I think Susie has the interpretation of beats that I read a while back in a book called 'Self-editing for authors'.

I loaned the 'Self-editing' book to someone who read my work and then said I need to think about the 'beats'. They've still got the book and I couldn't remember what it said beats in sentence structure.


What I guess I'm trying to quantify is what makes my writing - well - boring.

While I'm being self-indulgent, I'm not feeling sorry for myself, as I know it is [boring to read] and I need to work on it.

Thanks for the link to the page - especially the information on sentence structure and length. It is really useful as I tend to use a lot of short sentences and I don't have a rhythm to my writing. It is this area that I need to work on.

I've found this 'beat sheet' by the late scriptwriter Blake Snyder quite useful...

If you just google 'Blake Snyder Beat sheet' it comes up. Can;'t seem to get the link as something to download here [because it takes you into the doc] but is easily found. Hope it's helpful!

This is one of those fascinating and essential subjects, yet quite difficult to pin down. But for me, Susie's example nails something of the nature of meaningful pauses. To reverse it, perhaps, I've noticed with some writers who come from a film background, or who've been heavily influenced by film, there is a tendency to do things like write a couple of pages of nothing but dialogue. I think this in the belief that it makes the writing more exciting, because it's focussing on the 'meat', not slowing the pace with dialogue tags or description. But the reason that can work in film is because the actors (and directors) can interject pauses, meaningful expressions, etc, that stoke the reader's desire, a bit like delayed gratification. What the filmic writers maybe find hard to grasp is that adding bits of narrative to the dialogue actually enhances the excitement in the same way, not blunts it. Also, the excitement can be built even more with a novel than with film in one respect; which is that the 'beats' in prose can contain hints at what's actually going on inside the character's head - something film finds harder to do, and maybe has to rely on great actors to achieve.

I found Blake Snyder's 'Save the Cat!' very useful in looking at how to produce ongoing mini-cliffhangers. He breaks down a movie plot into dozens of stages, which is not untransferable to a book plot.

Terry

a couple of very simple tips:

end every chapter (or most) on a point where the reader wants to know what happens next - a moment of suspense.

Vary the length of sentences. I have realised (without even knowing that I was doing it) that every now and again I have a new para which consists of one short sentence, or even one word. An agent commented favourably on this and I take more notice of it now!

Going a bit deeper into this, perhaps, I think another consideration is the approach the writer takes. It seems to me that a lot of fiction these days - and particularly big market stuff - is written outside-in, rather than from the inside-out. So, skilful commercial writers will know the techniques of controlling pace, for example, and building tension. James Patterson seems to have almost made a science of it: chapters that are usually around the 800 words mark; short paragraphs, punchy dialogue, finish each scene on a cliff-hanger, etc. Yet, for me, it's mechanical writing which doesn't really excite me (because it's obvious and predictable). Inside-out writers have the ability to make their prose work on a more natural cause-delay-effect basis. They don't have to count words so much, as they have such a strong feel for their characters and the shape of the story they're in that they can make a simple conversation about the weather resonant with promise. A good example of this ability for me often turns up in the short stories of Lorrie Moore.

Terry

a lot of fiction these days - and particularly big market stuff - is written outside-in, rather than from the inside-out. So, skilful commercial writers will know the techniques of controlling pace, for example, and building tension.

This is true, and the main reason why I'm extremely wary of books, courses, teachers, who set out to describe 'How to write a story', say, in terms of these structural things: of providing a template for the neophyte writer to learn and then use, a list of the way stories 'should' be shaped, and so on.

Yes, in one sense such templates are the product of understanding how good stories work. But that doesn't mean that they're the way to learn to write a good story. Really good writing is, indeed, done from the inside out: it's about discovering the story, and then working out (using your intuitive or consciously-applied knowledge of structural stuff) the way to make it be its best self. And so I think writing-teaching should follow that path too: find the stuff, then shape it.

Emma

Yes, in one sense such templates are the product of understanding how good stories work. But that doesn't mean that they're the way to learn to write a good story. Really good writing is, indeed, done from the inside out: it's about discovering the story, and then working out (using your intuitive or consciously-applied knowledge of structural stuff) the way to make it be its best self. And so I think writing-teaching should follow that path too: find the stuff, then shape it.

I totally agree. It's a bit like the difference between someone who's good at telling jokes and someone who's funny. There is a lot of skill in telling a joke well, and someone who's funny can probably learn from that. Just as long as what they learn shapes the stuff better, rather than snuffs out the stuff. I don't think the joke-teller can learn from the funny person. Because telling jokes is a mechanical exercise, no matter how well done. But a funny person does something very different: they reach out and grab a piece of ordinary material then apply creativity to it, turning it into something that makes someone else laugh.

I was sitting near to two blokes in a cafe the other day. One was reading from the newspaper, said, "Look at this: Lady Gaga went to a party dressed as an egg." The other said, "Why, was she trying to get laid?" I don't think it was a rote joke; looked like he'd reacted creatively to the material to hand. Which is probably not a brilliant example of what I'm trying to say but maybe hints at the idea of that creative thing of grabbing stuff and turning it into a story, rather than cobbling together bits and pieces of other stories and passing the result of as a new one.

Terry

I think there's a certain kind of 'exciting' writing which American authors in particular specialise in (e.g. Hunter S Thompson or that very strange man who wrote The Black Dahlia) in which the excitement comes a lot of very lurid stuff happening very quickly & the author constantly hectoring you racily in the first person about the stuff happening and their extreme opinions about it.

It's all well and good. The problem is that after about 50 pages you start feeling like you've been locked in a cell with a ranting maniac & crave for something quieter and more sedate. Sort of boredom is the new excitement in neologistic terms. All this apropos of nothing in particular.