One More Time, on the Beat!

“Brigitte,” Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor, is available on ebook and audiobook. Follow the link to find them on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=brigitte+devin+davis&ref=nb_sb_noss_1

Become a patron today! Visit patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse

Get ahold of Krissy Barton with Little Syllables editing services. She does free sample edits to see if you and she would be the right fit. www.littlesyllables.com

Instagram: @authordevindavis

Twitter: @authordevind

The following is an imperfect transcript of this episode. A complete transcript can be found on the show’s webpage.

The episodes this year have mainly been about story structure. And today we are going to cover what beats are as we continue covering story structure today on Writing in the Tiny House. Hello? Hello. Hello. Welcome to the show. Welcome to Writing in the Tiny House. I am your host Devin Davis, and I am the guy in the tiny house in Northern Utah who writes stuff.

And talks about it on a podcast. So in the intro of this show, I have said that mainly this this podcast is for adults who work a nine to five, who really just want [00:01:00] to get that work of fiction out of their brains and onto paper. And while I certainly still stand by that, I've decided to refine that whole target audience.

this is what this show is. And I really like this on this show. This show pertains to everybody who wants to write, whether you work a nine to five, whether you are a 15 year old in high school, who wants to write short stories or work on your first novel or whatever this show has stuff for all of you.

If you want to do your own memoir, if you want to do this or that a collection of short stories. We like all the things on this show, we learn the terminology. And we develop a process so that you can have a manuscript that is ready to publish. If you are writing a short story, you can get that manuscript ready in as little as three months. And if you [00:02:00] are writing a novel, you can get it ready. in as little as 18 months, and hopefully in this podcast, We also give you the big picture and the reality that you might need longer than that, which is great. And some of you might say, no, there are plenty of short stories in this world that took years and years to write. And I am not going to disagree with you. And there are novels in this world.

There are flash fiction novels that took under three months to write. And so. What is the value of putting a timeframe on completing a work in progress when it is going to be different for everybody, it is simply to convey a possibility. The Thing is sometimes we don't get started with projects just because we don't understand how big the project is going to be. But knowing that getting started and with some practice, you can crank out a good short story in a pretty short amount of time. I [00:03:00] can give you encouragement to get started in the first place.

And to know that when you are writing a novel, if you stick with it and you practice, eventually you can get your process down to 18 months or 12 months, just depending on how diligent you are with it. Granted, there are a lot of long novels in this world that took years to write. I don't want to try to fill your head with unrealistic expectations, but to me, those expectations are realistic. from start to finish, I wrote the short story Brigitte in eight weeks. And so if you have your process down, you can definitely whittle out some of the time that it takes to get a good story.

And that is what this show is for. It is to learn the terminology and develop a process in order to have a manuscript ready to publish in a short amount of time. That's the thing and it can be done. And for your first few works in progress, it will take longer [00:04:00] than that.

So just know the things also, your process will likely be different from mine, and it just might be slower or faster. And that is why we are all different people. And that makes the world interesting to live in. Just some quick housekeeping stuff with with creativity. I have felt my creativity battery gradually recharge over the month of January.

For those of you who paid attention to my podcast. At the beginning of this year, there was a lot of personal stuff to get through from November until January 1st and going through that really drained my creative battery. And so I had a short story that I was in the middle of in the beginning of November.

That died on the vine. I am shelving that short story. It was called auto. I may pick it up again in the future. I may not. It was going to beInstallment Two of Tales from Vlaydor. But [00:05:00] instead Instllment Two of Tales from Vlaydor is now called Tiz. The idea of this short story has been in my head for the past six months.

And I have been eager to get started on this short story, but I thought for the longest time that I simply had to finish auto first before I could carry on. Tos and the thing is with creativity, it doesn't have to be linear and it doesn't have to work that way. And so, because I am eager to get started on this short story, I decided I might as well just start on it and we can deal with auto later.

So Tiz takes place about 170 years before Bridgette does. And it is about a linguist whose discoveries bring about the magical industrial revolution of the entire land ofVlaydor, so it's going to be a treat. It's going to be a wild ride. And I am very excited to explore the relationship of Tiz with her fiance [00:06:00] and.

It's just going to be good times and I'm so excited about it, guys. It is so good to be excited also with Tiz I have described before that, as far as writing goes, I am largely a pantser. I don't like to outline in a lot of detail, but with this one, I decided to approach it differently. And I decided to shove aside the pantser part of my creative writing process.

And to focus on outlining so that I can be the plotter and it's okay to flex both sets of muscles. And so I have been outlining, I have been doing character maps. I have been doing a real map. I mean, a real map of a fake place, because this is all fiction. But it's been good. And just the preparation that comes from doing all of that first has been very valuable.

And so there's value in all of it friends and it's okay. If for one short story, you are largely a pantser and [00:07:00] that equates to a lot more revisions and it's okay. If the next short story you are more of a plotter. So that your first draft can be a little farther along the process because you have such a good outline.

So there's that. We are excited to be back in the writing process and it's been good to build that foundational creativity so that in the next few days I'm going to start drafting this sucker and it's going to be great. I have over the past few episodes, I've talked about the three act structure and I went into what each of those acts is.

I also covered the hero's journey, which is a big outline of different points. That are typically found in an adventure story. And last week I covered the arc types that are found in the hero's journey and the arc types are just the different types of people that show up and the roles that they play in order [00:08:00] to further the story along.

So the hero, the mentor and more, and the list goes on. Today we are going to step back and talk about something a little bit more basic. One of the goals of this podcast is to talk about the terminology. Just because if you are hoping to revise your work and you're going to be sending it to people you don't know, or you're going to be sending it to professionals in order to get it critiqued.

Edited and improved upon if you are hoping to get any sort of positive feedback or feedback that is meant to help you in your process, you need to know the terminology. And I'm not talking about just sentence, structure and grammar. I'm talking about the terminology as it pertains to storytelling and as it pertains to creative writing.

And so today we are going to cover beats [00:09:00] and what beats are. And then next week we are going to see how Bridgette. Holds up to one of the most common and widely used set of beats. And just see how it goes. So a beat is the smallest measurable thing of storytelling.

A beat is an event or a moment or whatever that furthers the plot along. So a beats can be a moment of action. It can be a moment of reaction. It can be a moment of inaction. It can also be a scene. It can be a various number of different things so long as the plot progresses and if you get smaller than a beat, you're no longer working with just story elements.

You're more working with the fundamentals of sentence structure. So you're kind of stepping out of story if you are getting smaller than a [00:10:00] beat. So in the book, a swim in a pond in the rain by George Saunders, I highly recommend reading that book. That book has been one of the biggest. Resources for me on developmental edits and developmental edits.

You cover beats. It's all about beats. A swim in a pond in the rain is a collection of seven classic Russian short stories that George Saunders, who is a very successful, very well-known various. Celebrated and loved short story author. He goes through and picks them apart and analyzes them in many different ways, as a way to show you how you can do it, how all of this can be done.

And so sometimes it is pretty technical, which includes like charts and graphs. Sometimes it is more broad and it is actually more of a lesson in life, which I like all of that. I love a [00:11:00] really big approach to something like this. And so I have been eating up this book. I started this book a long time ago.

I didn't finish it, but with the way that my week has now started to unfold, now that I've taken on some additional activities, I have some time. To sit down and actually read a book. That's not on tape. That's not a recorded audio book. So I listened to audio books in the car, but I wanted something like this, like a resource book to be a physical copy so that I can reference it more easily.

I don't reference audio books very easily. So that's why I chose to do it this way. But in that book, in the book, a swim in the pond, in the rain by George Saunders, he says, The way to build intensity and the way to escalate your plot is to never repeat your beats. [00:12:00] So. Beats are these little events. They are the little things that drive the plot forward.

And if you repeat your beats, if you have a beat that shows up more than once in an identical way, it causes. The steam in your story to just kind of deflate and the story loses energy and your reader will lose interest. So that's what beets are when you have your first draft completed, or if you are detailing out a really good outline

depending on how you approach your process. If you like to do the big outlines or if you like to do just kind of a first draft and then fill in whatever is missing in your first draft, it is really good to compare your story to a sheet of beats. So there are things in this world called beat sheets, and to be perfectly honest, the hero's journey is a beat sheet.

It [00:13:00] has. Just the little different events and what they are for and what they do. And if you are writing an adventure story, you can kind of go through and see where the things are. You can see what they are and the order that they typically would go in and you can assign that to your story. You're like, oh, well, yeah.

I mean, crossing. Threshold happens in my story when this kid who, who has an overbearing dad stands up to his dad and then leaves. And that happens, you know, really early in the story. And it totally fits with this beat sheet. One of the more common or very well-known. Beat sheets. It's also a book it's called save the cat.

And it is a collection of 15 beats and it is structured in a similar way to the hero's journey. So it is a three act structure and important things happen in each [00:14:00] act. And we are going to go through next week. I am going to take you through an analysis of my short story, Brie sheets and plug it in to save the cat.

So save the cat. Like I said, it is a book.

It is written by Blake Snyder and there are actually several different versions of save the cat now. save the cat is originally for storytelling and screenwriting, but it absolutely applies to novels and other forms of storytelling too. And so you'll, you'll find many different applications. Of save the cat, but yeah, all those books are available on Amazon and I highly recommend referencing those books.

It is okay to have the references so that you know, the terminology. tuned in for that next week where we go through an analysis of Bri sheets and if breezy. [00:15:00] Saved the cat or rather if Del phene the main character of Bridgette saved the cat next week on writing in the tiny house.

Devin Davis:

And that is it for today. Just a reminder that "Brigitte,"Installment One of Tales from Vlaydor is available on Amazon as an ebook and on Audible and Apple Books as an audio book. And I provide advanced reader copies of these short stories as I release them to my patrons. So become a patron today by visiting patreon.com/writinginthetinyhouse to support both my writing and this podcast. And lastly, be sure to follow me on social media. My Instagram is @authordevindavis and my Twitter handle is@authordevind. Thank you so much for spending some time with me today and have fun writing. We will see you next time.