Definition
A beat sheet is a structural planning document that lists the key story beats from beginning to end. Think of it as the skeleton of your novel before you add the muscle and skin of prose. Each entry is a brief description of a significant moment: the inciting incident, the midpoint shift, the climax, and everything in between. The most famous beat sheet template comes from Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!, but writers adapt the concept to fit their own story structures.
Why It Matters
A beat sheet lets you see your entire story at a glance. That bird's-eye view is incredibly useful for spotting structural problems before you have written 60,000 words. Is your midpoint too late? Is there no real escalation between Act 1 and Act 2? A beat sheet makes these issues visible when they are still cheap to fix. Even dedicated pantsers sometimes use a loose beat sheet to keep themselves from wandering too far off course.
Types of Beat Sheet
Famous Examples
The book that popularized the beat sheet for a generation of writers. Snyder's 15-beat structure has been applied to everything from blockbuster films to debut novels.
Brody adapted Snyder's beat sheet specifically for novelists, with examples from popular fiction across genres. This is where most fiction writers encounter the concept.
Weir has spoken about outlining every problem and solution before writing. The novel's tightly structured escalation reads like a beat sheet brought to life.
Common Mistakes
Templates are training wheels, not rules. If your story needs a midpoint on page 200 instead of page 150, that is fine. The beats serve the story, not the other way around.
Try It Yourself
Write a beat sheet for a story you are working on using no more than 10 beats. For each beat, write one specific sentence describing what happens. Then check: does each beat cause the next one? If you can remove a beat without breaking the chain, it might not be essential. Tighten until every beat is load-bearing.
Build your beat sheet visually
Novelium's Story Planner lets you lay out your beats on a visual timeline, drag them around, and see how your story's structure holds together before you write a single chapter.