After I’ve got a decent collection of beats, and before writing detailed action and dialog, I like to assemble an approximate structure for an entire episode (TV series).
To do this, I use beat durations and take a guess how long I want each beat to last. This gives me an excellent view of the entire episode in the beat timeline bar.
And, because I tag (and color) each beat by character arc/plot, the beat timeline bar really stands out for sequencing and timing of the entire episode.
I then move beats around until I get the sequencing I want – that involves several parallel plot lines in multiple lanes. Causality, makes this so easy.
The only downside of this approach is that once each beat has been completed with action and dialog, you must remember to return each beat to “auto” duration. Otherwise, the final timeline won’t be accurate (to page count.) That step is a bit tedious but necessary.
It would be cool to have a filter to “show me all non-auto durations” or a “reset all durations to auto.”
And, that kind of filter would also let me quickly discover beats that aren’t finished. (I currently use a tag for “incomplete” but using the duration “mode” would work better for me.)
Good idea. It’s probably dangerous to start using the auto duration setting as a proxy for whether a beat is WIP. What you really need is a status system, which is planned.
But I’m wondering if there’s some kind of automatic way to do this where the beats graduate at some point, and start deriving their durations from the text rather then from a fixed length. The question is if there’s some universal threshold.
For example, if you didn’t write anything in the beats to begin with, but only did beat titles and synopsis, then it would be simply to have a logic that the moment you’re written some actual text, we switch out of auto. Now, I don’t actually believe in this idea, because I often write any ideas I have for dialogue into the beat right away, even if the beat is a mess around it.
So perhaps you do need a feature that does this in bulk, and a filter feature to help you find these beats.
But let’s brainstorm a bit. If there’s a way to do this automatically (i.e. without UI), I’d prefer this. But we can’t only cater to our own workflow. We have to imagine other ways of the using the app.
And, yes, a status flag, even if quite simple, would help. I mark WIP beats in their beat titles with a “???” so I can easily spot them on printed “Beat Titles and Synopsis” pages.
Yes, an “auto-enable” would be great. And, I agree, there’s often quite a lot of text in a WIP beat that’s simply conceptional – notes that later develop into action and dialog. So, I agree, the trigger would need to be something else. But what?