Story Beat Sheet Planner

Most stories that feel satisfying share a shape: something disturbs a character’s world, they commit to change it, the stakes rise, everything collapses, and they find a way through. Beat sheets name the turning points of that shape and say roughly where they fall. Placed on your own length — pages, words, minutes or chapters — they become a plan for a new draft or a diagnosis of an old one.

The four structures

Save the Cat, from screenwriter Blake Snyder and adapted for novels by Jessica Brody, has 15 beats, from the Opening Image to the Final Image. The classic three-act structure has fewer, broader beats: inciting incident, two plot points, a midpoint and a climax. The Hero’s Journey, in Christopher Vogler’s 12 stages, follows a protagonist into a special world and home again. Dan Harmon’s Story Circle compresses the journey into eight steps that fit a short story or a single episode.

Placing beats on your length

Choose the unit and enter the total: 110 pages for a feature screenplay, 80,000 words for a typical adult novel, 100 minutes, or a number of chapters. Every beat shows where it falls, as a single point or a span. For an 80,000-word novel in Save the Cat, the Catalyst lands near word 8,000, the Midpoint at 40,000 and All Is Lost at 60,000. The bar above the list shows the whole shape at a glance.

Planning a new story

Work through the beats in order and write a sentence or two in each box: what happens, who is involved and what changes. The prompt under each beat says what it is for. Gaps show quickly: a story with a strong opening and ending but nothing at the midpoint usually sags in the middle when written.

Diagnosing a draft

Mark where each beat actually happens in your draft and compare it with the target. A catalyst at 25% means a slow start; a climax that begins at 70% means a long denouement; a missing All Is Lost moment often explains why an ending feels unearned. Positions are guides, not rules — many great stories bend them deliberately — but a large mismatch is worth a second look.

Exporting the outline

Copy the Markdown into a writing app or download it as a file; beats without notes show their prompt in italics, so the outline still reads as a plan. The CSV has beat names, percentages, positions and notes for a spreadsheet or index-card app.

Working between structures

The same story can be mapped onto more than one structure, and doing so can help. The Midpoint in Save the Cat corresponds roughly to the Ordeal in the Hero’s Journey and step 5 of the Story Circle. Notes are saved separately for each structure, so switching does not overwrite anything.

Subplots and the B story

The main plot carries the external goal; a B story, usually a relationship, carries the theme. Save the Cat places it just after the break into Act Two, at about 22%. Plan it in the same boxes, or note where it crosses the main plot: at the midpoint and in the break into Act Three, the two should meet.

Related tools

Write the script in the Fountain Screenplay Editor or the Comic Script Formatter, keep scene notes in the Online Notepad, or track the length of each part with the Word Counter.