Beats Part II: When and How to Use Beats
July 29, 2022Question of the Day: Bait and Switch
August 15, 2022Previously in this series, we’ve already covered how to structure a beat, and how those beats impact tension, pacing, and processing time for the reader. Since then, it’s been pointed out that my previous posts only covered beats as experienced by the POV character. Well, this post is for all those poor non-POV characters I’ve accidentally excluded up until now.
Let’s dive right in.
How do you write a beat for a non-POV character?
First, let’s build an example we can use throughout the post.
Let’s say the POV character is telling their parent that they’ve actually been lying to their parent for years. Here’s the scene
Lily faced her dad, who was still mostly occupied by drying the dishes. “I have to tell you something,” she said.
“What?” he asked.
Lily took a deep breath. It was now or never. She could already feel the tears stinging her eyes, and she hadn’t even said a word yet! “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’m not a good little school girl who’s gone away to get a science degree. This whole time, I’ve been training at the police academy. I’m not going to be a scientist. I’m going to be a police officer.”
“Oh,” he said.
You can see that I went ahead and started with Lily’s emotional beat fully articulated. It follows all the steps we’ve already established.
- Physical motion to bring the reader’s attention to the character.
- Thought process, articulating what’s going on in the character’s mind.
- Action/dialogue to exit out of the beat.
The dad’s beats are completely absent, though. We might be able to guess what he’s thinking, but that’s it. Is he shocked? Angry? Accepting? After reading that, we have no idea.
Now, let’s take a hard look at the steps of articulating a beat to see what we can generalize to a non-POV character.
Step one requires a physical motion. That’s easy, we can use an action tag.
Step two is more difficult (unless you’re in omniscient—-at which point no-one is the POV character, and you use italics-formated thoughts for everyone.)
Step three requires another action, dialogue, or something to transition back out. The dialogue we’ve already got works just fine for that step.
Right now, it looks like we’ve got two out of three steps. Let’s update the example.
Lily faced her dad, who was still mostly occupied by drying the dishes. “I have to tell you something,” she said.
He set down the plate in his hand even though it was only half dry, and swung the dish towel over his shoulder. “What?” he asked.
Lily took a deep breath. It was now or never. She could already feel the tears stinging her eyes, and she hadn’t even said a word yet! “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’m not a good little school girl who’s gone away to get a science degree. This whole time, I’ve been training at the police academy. I’m not going to be a scientist. I’m going to be a police officer.”
Her dad blinked at her, his lips thinned into an expression of dismay. “Oh,” he said.
The first addition shows the dad pausing what he was doing and turning his attention to her. He’s preparing himself to listen. The second addition shows his reaction to what he’s been told. He blinks, which is often a way (somewhat cliche, I’ll admit) to portray shock. Then, he looks dismayed.
This is a pretty decent beat already. The reader can tell (sort of) what’s going on in the non-POV character’s head by how the POV character sees their reaction.
We’re not done yet, though.
A fully articulated beat doesn’t just show the character’s reaction, it also slows the pacing, ups the tension, and gives the reader time to process.
What if you need that same effect, but the person reacting isn’t your POV character? What then?
In that situation, you really need access to step 2, where you show the thoughts of the person who’s reacting to the new information. So, how do you do that when the person who is reacting is not the POV character?
Short answer, you can’t. But, you can do something that’s almost as good. Use your POV character to their fullest extent. You can only access your POV character’s thoughts, right? So show their evaluation of the character who is reacting!
Here’s an example:
Lily faced her dad, who was still mostly occupied by drying the dishes. “I have to tell you something,” she said.
He set down the plate in his hand even though it was only half dry, and swung the dish towel over his shoulder. “What?” he asked.
Lily took a deep breath. It was now or never. She could already feel the tears stinging her eyes, and she hadn’t even said a word yet! “I’m sorry,” she choked out. “I’m not a good little school girl who’s gone away to get a science degree. This whole time, I’ve been training at the police academy. I’m not going to be a scientist. I’m going to be a police officer.”
Her dad blinked at her, his lips thinned into an expression of dismay.
Lily’s breath hitched. She’d seen that expression before, on the day her older sister had abandoned them for the big city. She braced herself for the explosion.
“Oh,” he said.
These three sentences are actually a fully constructed beat. Action, thought, action. This may be a beat about Lily’s reaction to her dad’s reaction, but adding this beat focused on the relationship helps pull out this moment so the reader can process alongside the main character.
What we really have here is a partial beat (the best we can get, given it’s a non-POV character) followed by a full beat.
Should you always use this structure?
Absolutely not. Nine times out of ten, the partial beat structure will be sufficient to note the non-POV character’s reaction and move on. For those extra moments where the pacing is so fast the reader might miss an important reaction by a non-POV character, though, this structure will show the character’s reaction, then slow the pacing down enough that the reader has time to process.
So, there you have it! Beats are an essential part of the story, whether it’s a POV-character beat or not. Have you thought of any other ways to use beats in your stories? Let me know in the comments below!
If you missed the first two parts of this series, here are the links:
