The Beats Technique builds a scene by taking the key character (e.g. the ‘Point-of-View’ being used) and asking a series of questions, the answers to which will provide the rhythm of the scene. The beats of any scene might include where a character has come from, what they want, where they are heading, what stands in their way, how the character’s POV, previous experience – or inexperience – assists or constrains that character as they move through the scene.
How does ‘Beats’ work?
Place a character at the start of a narrative chapter and ask ‘beat questions.’ The answers to each question becomes a choice for that character in the scene; a series of choices then builds plot and narrative. A series of such beats can be viewed as a rhythmic pathway for a character to take. These beats and the associated rhythmic pathway will often begin before the start of the scene. There will be introductory details, offscene developments, a backstory, that will decide the rhythmic pathway of the scene.
Beat questions, often concerning movement, motive, complication, opposition, impact and consequence, make this technique especially suited to the opening of a chapter.
Illustration: The Beats Technique
At the opening to the narrative The Tailor the character ‘Anjali’s Uncle’ enters the first scene and chapter. The following beat questions produced the rhythmic pathway that Anjali’s uncle followed through the opening scene.
1. Where has he come from?
The Pathway: He arrives as an immigrant, carrying not luggage but inheritance – a craft drawn through at least five generations of needle and loom.
In the Narrative: He is the first of the family to ‘set down his sewing machine’ in the valley, the silk thread of lineage following him into a grey town at the seam of the hills.
2. What are his priorities?
The Pathway: Survival before ambition – a foothold taken cheaply and quickly, before any thought of reputation.
In the Narrative: He takes one end of a once-abandoned warehouse because the rental is affordable; the premises are dictated his means, not his aspirations.
3. What are his objectives?
The Pathway: To plant a tailoring trade where none exists, and to extend it across the whole social range of the valley.
In the Narrative: ‘There were no other tailors in the area’; the family reputation is soon stretched from the wealthy head of the valley down to the poorer estates at its foot.
4. What are his constraints?
The Pathway: A poor, cold valley whose trade already belongs to competitors; limited capital; isolation.
In the Narrative: An established order into which a lone tailor must somehow stitch himself.
5. Through what lens does he read the scene?
The Pathway: The organiser’s and outsider’s eye – one who reads a valley’s future the way a Farmer reads the land, finding the opportunity inside the adversity.
In the Narrative: ‘A skill for organisation, and a skin as thick as a cotton canvas’ the damp and the cold are recast not as deterrents but as ‘the perfect business partners of any tailor’.
6. Where is he heading?
The Pathway: Towards an established, profitable service that will anchor the family – and the generations, including Anjali, who follow.
In the Narrative: The stretched reputation becomes the foundation on which the whole story is later built; his arrival is the first stitch of Anjali’s inheritance.
Beat Questions & Rhythmic Pathways
The six ‘beats’ used in this illustration provide the rhythmic pathways through the first scene of ‘The Tailor.’ The combined pathways provide a musical stave populated with a series of themes and rhythmic pathways; the narrative becomes the complex melody added to these.
- The Threshold: Beats 1 and 2 place the uncle at the edge of the valley – an outsider entering the valley with little but his craft, looking for an accessible and stable foothold.
- The Obstacles: Beats 3 and 4 supply the challenges: an empty market, an isolating geography, a hostile climate – the resistance that Anjali’s uncle faces and which give the scene its depth.
- The Direction: Beats 5 and 6 take the storyline forward. Anjali’s Uncle turns adversity into advantage. The tailoring trade is established and the river carries the story down the valley to Anjali – and then Panya.
Illustration: Narrative Outcome
The beats listed above, and the rhythmic pathways they establish, developed into the following narrative from The Tailor:
Anjali’s uncle first arrived as an immigrant in a grey town at the end of a wet valley, which was bordered at the bottom by the sea. A river ran like a silken ribbon along the seam of the valley and into the ruffled salt waters of the estuary.
Her uncle was the first member of her family to set down his sewing machine in this valley. There were no other tailors in the area, and the rental on one end of a once abandoned warehouse was affordable.
With its unsurpassed ability to grow trees, and with its streams and rivers driving the watermills and joineries, Wetledale had evolved into the valley of the Cabinet Makers. The exquisite cabinets made here were highly priced and highly prized. Crucially, the Fraternity of Cabinet Makers had realised they could ship their durable products by sea, bypassing the treacherous mountain roads.
With a skill for organisation, and a skin as thick as a cotton canvas, her uncle was soon successfully stretching the family’s tailoring reputation from the higher and wealthier end of the valley, all the way down to the poorer housing estates at the bottom edge of the town.
‘Damp and cold are the perfect business partners of any tailor,’ wrote her uncle in response to Anjali’s father’s suggestion that there could be more temperate places to settle.
Beats in combination
Other techniques that work well in combination with The Beats Technique.
- The Core Question – defines the problem a section of text is trying to solve.
- Avenues – builds passages that add precise and complementary detail to the narrative.