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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47599
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/47599
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I don't agree with McKee's definition of "Story", like many writers I think this difference between a "beat" and an "event" are contrived. I think the way McKee intends them to be used, "beats" are little events, and "events" are only used for larger "events", e.g. a Battle is an event presented in a scene, but the beats of the battle are the little turning points of your character(s) within that scene, as they worry about fighting, find their courage, etc. So in the **scene** they go, step-by-step from, say, "fear of battle" to "veteran of battle", or "dread of killing" to "killer by necessity", or something else. They experience a large change (event) as the result of many smaller changes (beats).

So McKee's Event is a turning point in the plot -- The battle was won or lost. It resolved some tension in the reader, but perhaps created a new tension or conflict.

**McKee's** Beat is a NOT a turning point in a plot, but a change point in the character's emotional journey. For example they go from fearful of risk, to resigned to risk, to acting on risk, and so on, each a change of mindset coming with its own types of thoughts, arguments, expressions and behavior. A woman that doesn't want to get in a fist fight looks and feels different than a woman that has resigned herself to being in a fist fight. That is a McKee Beat for that character, but obviously not the whole scene. At the same time, the woman picking the fight has had no emotional change, and no McKee Beat, she began angry and wanting to fight, she is taunting and harassing the MC that did not want to fight, and nothing in the antagonist's mind has changed: No McKee Beats for her.

Like @LaurenIpsum I prefer the screenwriter definition, a beat is basically a plot point for the MC. This is often accompanied by a mental change in the MC (as McKee suggests) but not always; or it is a stretch to say so because your MC is constantly experiencing many _other_ mental changes.

For example, in Enemy of the State, a videotape (on CD) is surreptitiously given to a lawyer (Will Smith, the MC), hidden in his shopping bag. That is a Beat in screenwriting, the whole plot hinges on this two-second event within a scene between two college friends, but the MC has no idea anything has happened, and his mental state afterward is still "shopping for a present for his wife". But through surveillance cameras the NSA realizes this information they don't want to get out (videotape of a murder they committed) has been given to Smith, and they proceed to ruin his life, for reasons he at first does not comprehend, and mistakenly attributes to a criminal he is pursuing as a lawyer.

So maybe that is an "event" and not a "beat" in McKee terminology, but it seems like an artificial distinction to me. It is a **beat** in screenwriting, and I transfer that same notion of a **plot point event the audience sees** to the novel or story. Whether or not it involves any characters, I could open with a dramatic billiard-ball series of collisions amongst asteroids colliding that sends one spinning on a collision course with Earth, that is an event, and a plot point beat, involving no emotional changes in any character (but it may cause an emotional change in the audience).

Original score: 1