Beating the Story: How to Map, Understand, and Elevate Any Narrative

by Robin D. Laws, Colleen Riley (Editor), Jeff Tidball (Editor)

See How Stories Work The most compelling stories move us emotionally. Up and down, between hope and fear, in ways we don t always expect but that you can harness as a writer, editor, and critic. This book shows you how to track, map, and understand the rhythm of a story. Whether you re writing or rewriting, editing a manuscript or dismantling your favorite television episode, Beating the Story helps you understand how stories get hammered into shape. Beating the Story combines Laws insightful and articulate analysis of story beats with all-new transition beats and icons to do for fiction and screenplays what his Hamlet s Hit Points did for narrative games. Read it and see how to map, understand, and elevate any narrative. Foreword by John Rogers.

Genres: Writing, Nonfiction, Role Playing Games

220 pages, Perfect Paperback

First published May 1, 2018

About the author

Writer and game designer Robin D. Laws brought you such roleplaying games as Ashen Stars, The Esoterrorists, The Dying Earth, Heroquest and Feng Shui. He is the author of seven novels, most recently The Worldwound Gambit from Paizo. For Robin's much-praised works of gaming history and analysis, see Hamlet's Hit Points, Robin's Laws of Game Mastering and 40 Years of Gen Con.

Reviews

[Michael Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

So many writing books say the same thing, over and over, derived from screenplays. Beating the Story takes a different, broader perspective that focuses not so much on structure, but on essential story elements, and the details of pacing, particularly the audience's emotional investment. This really opened my eyes to some problems in the novel I've been struggling with for far too long. I expect to be coming back to this one again and again.

[Hans Otterson]

In this book, Robin Laws purports to explicate a model of the emotional rhythms of a story, primarily through looking at two elements: beats and transitions. On the face of it, that sounds...good? Reasonable? But I experienced this book as a bewildering forest of classifications and disparate techniques with no felt center.

Regarding beats, the advice on offer can be entirely, and accurately, summarized as "varying the emotional beats of your story is good, and over the course of the story the emotional beats should probably trend downward." That's about all he tells us with regard to how his model of fiction is of use to the working writer.

It's about the same with transitions: there's a flurry of type-categorization, but he fails to convince me of the use of all this taxonomy other than, again, saying that variety is good, so knowing the types helps you know when variety is present or absent.

I'm not saying the book is garbage; I can certainly see myself using beat mapping for a scene that isn't working but otherwise should be in terms of character, stakes, motivation, etc--it might show me something I'm missing. But this book could have been an article; most of it is not useful for help in understanding fiction.

7C

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book on writing focused on the author's story beat mapping method first introduced as an aid to role-players in his book Hamlet's Hit Points.

This isn't just a rehash of the previous book with a different focus. It's a complete guide to writing fiction from conceiving the story to revising drafts. There's also a few notes on using the tools provided as an editor or collaborator, and even a small section on using them for critical analysis.

As with the first book, three full examples are broken down using the author's method. In this case a Mad Men episode, an X-Files episode, and a section of the novel The Color Purple.

While I'm not the core audience, I would recommend this book to any authors looking to add to their writing toolkit.

[Brian Rogers · Rating 3 out of 5]

A continuation of Laws' _Hamlet's Hit Points_, he takes the story beat premise he designed for that gaming title and tries to apply it to a broader story analysis and crafting tool. I'd say he's mostly successful. Bear in mind that I was mostly interested in this for it's ongoing gaming application, so some of the "here's how to use it as a professional writer" was directly on task for his thesis statement but wasn't super-relevant to me. I'd still recommend it for that purpose, and certainly for people who are interested in professional fiction as fiction.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meticulous updating of Laws' beat mapping structure, introduced in HAMLET'S HIT POINTS, for narrative fiction. It's thorough and full of useful examples without sacrificing the author's dry humor.

My copy had a ton of editing errors in it, which wasn't great, but nothing that makes the meaning of any exercise unclear.

[Josh Storey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beat mapping is a very structured, analytical way of looking at your story. Personally, I find a strong structure more inspirational than a blank page, so this book was a godsend. Especially when combined with the lessons I've learned from Mary Robinette Kowal.

[Lindsay · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well thought out and practical. The only draw back is the application is not communicated in a manner that makes it simple to apply.