Scenes and Story Beats
3 min readMay 23, 2020
What is a Story Beat?
In a nutshell, a story beat — as opposed to an acting beat or a parenthetical beat used in dialogue — is a single scene. In other words, a story beat is single unit of dramatic action.
The dramatic action of every scene begins with a character who has a clear want. Someone or something wants to prevent that character from achieving his or her goal. And the outcome of the…
