If you’ve ever opened up Save the Cat or pulled out a Hero’s Journey template tried to “map” your story’s beats and ended up more confused than when you started, you’re not alone. (I love them both, but Inkwell members overwhelmingly told me the other day that they’d like to throw Save the Cat across the room.)
For many writers, story structure can start to feel like a test you’re afraid of failing. You look at a framework, try to plug your story into it, and suddenly you’re wondering whether you even understand your own draft anymore.
Here’s the good news:
Beats are not rules. They’re descriptions.
They name the movement your story is already making.
And once you understand that, structure stops feeling restrictive and starts feeling grounding.
What Beats Actually Are
At their simplest, beats are moments of meaningful change.
They’re the points in a story where something shifts, emotionally, relationally, or logistically.
Beats answer one core question:
What is changing here, and why does it matter?
Beats exist on every level of storytelling, from entire novels down to individual scenes. Anytime there’s a shift, that’s a beat. And you don’t have to plan them in advance to be using them well. If you follow emotional shifts and character choices, you’re already working with beats—whether you call them that or not.
A Simple, Flexible Beat Framework
For long-form storytelling, one of the cleanest ways to talk about beats is through the classic story structure often associated with Freytag’s Pyramid:
Inciting Incident
Rising Action
Climax
Falling Action
Resolution
These terms have been around for centuries for a reason: they describe how stories move, not how they’re supposed to look on the page. What matters most is not labeling every moment correctly but understanding what each beat is doing.
The Inciting Incident (or Incidents)
The inciting incident is the beat that disturbs the protagonist’s ordinary world and sets the story in motion.
But here’s something many writers don’t hear enough:
The inciting incident is often a cluster of moments, not a single scene.
At the beginning of a story, you’ll often see possibility appear, resistance surface, support arrive, and then change become inevitable.
Different writers feel the story truly “starts” at different points in that cluster. Some see the moment possibility appears as the inciting incident. Others say it’s when the character commits. Both instincts are valid.
What matters is choosing the moment that feels like movement for you—the moment where the story stops circling and starts going somewhere.
Rising Action: Where Pressure Builds
Rising action isn’t about stuffing in events or escalating spectacle. It’s about pressure.
This is the long middle of the story, and it includes the moments when desires sharpen, complications start to pile up, initial attempts succeed or fail, and stakes become clearer.
Importantly, rising action can include moments that feel huge or dramatic. A big emotional spike doesn’t automatically mean you’ve hit the climax. Sometimes it simply means the story has found a new way to build momentum.
If your draft feels like it has “too much middle,” it’s often because you haven’t yet identified what question that middle is building toward.
Climax: Where the Story’s Question Is Answered
Climax is one of the most misunderstood beats.
It is not always the loudest moment, the most chaotic moment, or the point of highest tension.
Very often, it is the moment when the story’s central question is finally answered.
Sometimes the moment of highest tension comes earlier, and the climax arrives later in a quieter scene—through a moment of recognition, revelation, or confirmation of identity.
If you’re torn between two possible climaxes, here’s a helpful question:
Which moment resolves what the story is truly about?
That’s usually your climax.
Falling Action and Resolution: Letting the Meaning Land
Once the climax resolves the story’s core tension, the falling action shows us the consequences of that resolution.
This is where the world adjusts in any number of ways:
Relationships shift
Losses or gains are felt
The cost of change becomes visible
Resolution then offers a glimpse of the new equilibrium. It doesn’t need to explain everything or tie every thread into a bow. It simply shows us that the story has happened, and that something is different now.
Using Beats Without Losing Your Intuition
Beats are most useful when they help you see your story more clearly—not when they make you second-guess your instincts.
If you’re a discovery writer, beats can help you look back at a draft and recognize the movement you’ve already created.
If you’re an intuitive plotter, beats can give you a few steady anchor points without requiring a rigid outline.
And if you live somewhere in between, beats offer reassurance: Your story has a shape, even if you’re building it slowly and imperfectly.
Start Small: Two Beats Are Enough
If structure feels overwhelming, start here:
What moment disturbs your character’s ordinary world?
What moment finally resolves the story’s deepest question?
Those two beats—the inciting incident and the climax—often reveal the entire spine of the story.
Everything else is connective tissue.
The Takeaway
Your story already has a heartbeat.
Beats don’t create that rhythm—they help you hear it.
You don’t need to choose the “right” framework for your novel, or the. You need to choose the one that helps you move forward with clarity and confidence.
And that’s always allowed to change as your story grows.
If you want support working through beats in a way that honors your intuition and your real life, The Inkwell offers gentle structure, live coaching, and a community that understands what it means to write in and around the chaos of everyday life.