I’ve seen it as fairly standard in radio plays, which are often read almost cold with the actors maybe having a single scan of the text prior. I believe the same is true of animation for similar reasons.

I don’t know who is teaching “beat” as “pause” in dialogue. The hard thing about screenwriting is that the dialogue should ideally carry itself. If you read great writing, you understand that there is a pregnant pause/emotional turn in the conversation – but the writer does not need to write “beat” for us to understand it within the scene. That is the challenge. Professional scripts do not ever have “beat” written in them. This is an automatic sign of a new writer who doesn’t know better.

That said, this isn’t a peeve of mine – they’ll learn not to do it. I don’t penalize any script for using “beat” as a pause or turn, but you just don’t need to do it. It’s a distraction on the page to the reader. You should be writing your characters in a way that is defined enough that I will understand how they would say a line and when they would have an issue with something.

If there is a huge emotional turn in the conversation, this can be indicated with a specific line of action to break up the dialogue – such as one character turns away, steps back, etc. – to indicate that there has been a shift between them. However, it’s important to use these action lines sparingly so as not to break up the flow of the dialogue. Dialogue that is overwritten with action lines is annoying to any reader.

Dennis, I’ll post an example of how emotional beats, or reversals, work in scenes. Within the scene, the term “beat” is simply used (actually, mostly within an acting context) to indicate wherever there is a significant emotional reversal or reveal. A turning point within the scene. You think things are one way, but then something happens to spin the scene in a new direction.

For example, if there is a scene where the hero fights the antagonist and we think he’s winning and is about to kill that antagonist – such as in Star Wars – but then suddenly the antagonist reveals that he’s really the father and not just an evil stranger, that moment would be considered the emotional turning point of the scene and could be referred to as the “beat” of that scene.

If I were carding out that moment for plot/outlining purposes, I would probably write something to the extent of, “Big action fight sequence with Luke and Darth Vader. Luke discovers that Darth Vader is really his father.”

I personally don’t outline my scenes unless they are long sequences and there is more than one action/reveal within the scene/sequence. You don’t really need to so long as you have an understanding of what is being revealed in the scene and if there is an emotional turning point.

Thanks for your comment and email me if you need more specific help!

Thanks, Zach. Please let me know if you need any additional explanations, or if I can help streamline the outlining process for you. A friend of mine had asked me to post some of my outline cards, and I’ll try to do that in the new year. Good luck!

Thx Monica!

This is a reversal beat (#3), within the scene, but it’s likely that this particular scene has both a major story beat as well as an emotional beat. I don’t recall that specific scene in “3 Days” (sorry, haven’t seen that in a while), however is this when the baddie is asking him if he’s alright? If so, that’s just a reversal rich in subtext because the bad guy is pretending to be his friend when really he’s trying to kill him.