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The Revision Tool Your Frazzled Brain Needs
Why a beat sheet is the best way to see the forest for the trees
Vaccinated or not vaccinated, employed or underemployed, it is really hard to write right now. And it’s no picnic to revise. Your mind wanders, the very act of writing feels futile, maybe irrelevant. But you must create — you must! When we write or revise well, it takes us out of our heads and away from the current moment to a safe, exciting place called ART. Today, I want to share a terrific revision tool with you that will help you keep your creative writing (and mind) on track.
What’s a beat sheet, anyway? A “beat sheet” is a Hollywood tool that allows a screenwriter or outside reader to experience the most important plot points of a film project without reading an entire script. Do not open another web page and Google “beat sheet” because you will be presented with something far more complicated than you need to see. The beat sheet that I have in mind for your exhausted writing brain is elemental, simple. It’s pasta with good butter. It’s a way to defend the decisions you have made paragraph by paragraph throughout your project. It works for short stories, essays, and book length projects of any genre. My favorite way to do a beat sheet is to print out the entire document in question and write the “beats” in the margins, but if you…
