Template
Beat sheet template and calculator
Fifteen beats, and the word each one lands on in a book your length. Set your target below — the numbers update, so you can plan against your own manuscript instead of converting percentages by hand.
| Beat | % | Word | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| Opening image | 0% | 0 | The world and the flaw, before anything moves. |
| Theme stated | 5% | 4,500 | Someone says what the book is about. The hero ignores it. |
| Set-up | 8% | 7,000 | The life that is about to stop working. |
| Catalyst | 10% | 9,000 | The thing that arrives and cannot be undone. |
| Debate | 15% | 13,500 | Refusing, hesitating, looking for another way out. |
| Break into two | 20% | 18,000 | The choice that makes going back impossible. |
| B story | 22% | 20,000 | The relationship that carries the theme. |
| Fun and games | 30% | 27,000 | The promise of the premise — what the reader came for. |
| Midpoint | 50% | 45,000 | A false win or false loss that raises the stakes for real. |
| Bad guys close in | 60% | 54,000 | The cost compounds, mostly through the hero's own doing. |
| All is lost | 75% | 67,500 | The loss that cannot be argued with. |
| Dark night of the soul | 78% | 70,000 | Nothing happens. That is the point. |
| Break into three | 80% | 72,000 | What they understand now that they did not at the start. |
| Finale | 85% | 76,500 | The plan, the cost, and the confrontation. |
| Final image | 99% | 89,000 | The opening image, answered. |
Structure popularised by Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!, with screenplay page counts converted to novel word counts. Descriptions are ours.
How to read the numbers
The percentages are load-bearing in wildly different amounts. Three of them are worth taking seriously:
- The break into two, at 20%. If the story has not committed to its actual premise by a fifth of the way in, readers stop. This is the one that matters most, and the one first drafts most often miss.
- The midpoint, at 50%. Something has to change here — what they want, what they know, or what it costs. A middle without a midpoint is the sag everyone complains about in act two.
- All is lost, at 75%. Late enough to hurt, early enough to recover from. Push it past 85% and the ending has no room to earn itself.
The rest are guidance. Nobody has ever put a book down because the theme was stated at 7% instead of 5%.
A worked example
Take a 90,000-word thriller. The break into two lands around word 18,000 — call it chapter seven of a 2,500-word-chapter book. The midpoint sits at 45,000, chapter eighteen. All is lost arrives at 67,500, chapter twenty-seven, leaving roughly nine chapters to turn it around.
Written that way, the common structural problem becomes obvious before you draft it: if your protagonist does not commit to the investigation until chapter twelve, you have spent 30,000 words on a set-up the beat sheet budgets 18,000 for, and every later beat slides with it.
Common questions
What is a beat sheet?
A list of the structural moments a story hits and roughly where each one falls. It is a shape, not a plot: two books with identical beats can be completely different novels.
Does the Save the Cat beat sheet work for novels?
Mostly. It was written for screenplays, where a page is a minute and the structure is enforced by runtime. Novels have more room, so treat the percentages as a range rather than a mark — a midpoint at 47% or 54% is fine, one at 70% is a diagnosis.
What if my draft does not match the beats?
That is information, not a verdict. The useful move is to check the shape rather than force it: if your all-is-lost lands at 90%, the reader gets no room to feel it, and that is worth fixing. If your fun-and-games runs slightly long, it probably does not matter at all.
Should I write the beat sheet before or after drafting?
Either. Before, it stops you from writing three hundred pages toward a midpoint that never arrives. After, it tells you where the existing draft actually turns — which is usually not where you thought.