What’s a beat? If you don’t know, you’re in good company, because neither did we until we cracked open this chapter of Sandra Scofield’s The Scene Book. Beats are the tiny units of action and reaction that make up a scene. They’re how you control pacing, and they’re a handy way to check that your scene actually makes sense, moment to moment. True to her show-don’t-tell philosophy, Scofield teaches by example, so we dig into several book scenes, including her favorite, A Room with a View. But it really clicked when we tackled the exercises: first we hunted for beats in published work, then we used them to build scenes of our own.
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Drop the Beat: Pacing Your Scenes Moment by Moment
What’s a beat? If you don’t know, you’re in good company, because neither did we until we cracked open this chapter of Sandra Scofield’s The Scene Book. Beats are...