Beat

A beat is the smallest unit of dramatic action. The hierarchy runs downward, story, act, sequence, scene, beat, and Robert McKee's Story (1997) defines the beat as "an exchange of behavior in action/reaction": one behavior met by a changed behavior, the moment a scene shifts. The word carries a second, older sense from stage and screen, a small amount of action producing a pause in dialogue, the stage business and the parenthetical "(beat)" in a script, which McKee explicitly keeps apart from his structural sense. Pacing follows the count: action genres carry more beats, usually events, while dramas carry fewer, usually decisions or discoveries.

For a novelist the beat is the revision unit. A scene in which no behavior changes has no beats, and is doing nothing but occupying pages; a chapter draft checked beat by beat, decision, event, discovery, is the honest test of whether it moved. Counting and ordering beats in advance is a different tool, the beat sheet, a short list of a story's pivotal actions and emotional turning points; the best known is Save the Cat. At the level of release rhythm, beats are also how pacing is tuned inside a chapter.