Candle Craft 2: Two-Beat Stories
by Royal McGraw
Royal McGraw has written professionally for film, television, comics, and games for over 20 years. He led development on the mobile smash hit Choices: Stories You Play and currently serves as CEO of Candlelight Games.
Welcome! This is the second installment of a multi-part series intended to provide you with 10 Quick And Actionable Adjustments that you can make to your own writing process to improve your storytelling. Some of these process adjustments will be strategic, offering suggestions to improve how you think about storytelling from a big-picture standpoint. Some of these process adjustments will be tactical, offering suggestions to improve how you think about tackling scenes or even individual lines of dialogue. In all cases, these lessons have been hard-won, gleaned from over 20 years of experience writing across a variety of different mediums.
The Power of Change
In the previous installment of Candle Craft, we looked at several existing definitions of story, and then we developed our own. Our definition was just one word:
CHANGE
We chose this definition because change is an objective razor you can hold your own work against while you write. Either your narrative demonstrated change, even if that change was vanishingly small, or it did not.
If we aim to improve our work, we must be able to measure our work. Going forward, change (and the elements that describe change) will be our first unit of measurement.
Our second unit of measurement comes when we choose to divide change in half.
What is Two-Beat Storytelling?
As discussed last time, Aristotle wrote that stories have three stages – commonly referred to as “beginning, middle, and end.” A lot of writing classes teach this idea, and this is true conceptually. Retroactively, we can look at any change that has occurred and describe:
starting state
change action
end state
But in practice, a great deal of functional storytelling will regularly place at least one of these pieces “off-screen”, with ex-ante intentionality or ex post facto explanation filling in the blanks.
Two-beat storytelling acknowledges this. In this technique, a story (or story arc) is divided into two distinct parts or “beats”.
That makes each of these two beats equal to one half of change.
Putting Two-Beat Storytelling into Practice
When we think of putting a character through a journey, we are describing change.
At the beginning of The Matrix, Neo is disillusioned with his role in life. He questions reality. He is unaware of the war between humans and machines. By the end of the series, Neo embraces his role as “The One”, transcends his human limitations to understand true reality, and brings peace between humans and machines.
At the beginning of Twilight, Bella Swan is a shy, introverted teen from a broken family. By the end of the series, she has transformed into a confident vampire building a stable family of her own.
We could make these starting states like so…
…and we could map these ending states like so.
And of course, there is a whole lot that happens between each of these moments. But what is really critical to understand is that these two states rely on each other. They are quantum entangled.
You cannot alter one without also inadvertently altering the other, because they are not two separate things – collectively, the distance between the beginning and ending states are what form change.
As an example, we could adjust the beginning of The Matrix, making Neo a confident programmer who embraces his role in life and happily accepts reality. Intuitively, we can see that even if our new version of The Matrix ended the same way, the change Neo undergoes is irrevocably altered. It might still be a great story, but it’s a very different story. The arc of the character, and therefore the growth required, has been altered.
Of course, most narratives aren’t just two beats. There are many beats (many films, in fact) in between the beginning of The Matrix and the end of the series. Same for Twilight.
Even so, the same principle can and does apply across the whole of the narrative. Stories are change. No scene exists in isolation, and it makes your life so much harder to pretend that they do.
This brings us to the first Quick and Actionable adjustment that you can make to own writing process to improve your storytelling:
TIP #1: Write (and outline) your scenes in pairs
Accept and acknowledge the reality that stories demonstrate change, and that every scene you write is entangled with another scene. When you next sit down to write, write both scenes.
This won’t be easy, especially the first time! We’ll discuss how to approach this work in our next installment of Candle Craft. Check back next time for TWO-BEAT STRUCTURES.