Fourteen story structures.
All the beats.
One page per structure. The beats, what they mean, a famous film mapped against them, and how to actually use the framework when you sit down to write.
The Hero's Journey is the grand-daddy template — Joseph Campbell's twelve-stage monomyth that Christopher Vogler brought to Hollywood and hu…
Dan Harmon's Story Circle is the Hero's Journey, boiled down to eight steps and a sentence-long mnemonic per beat. Popularized through Commu…
Three-act is the default load-bearing wall of Western drama. Setup, Confrontation, Resolution — with Inciting Incident, First Act Turn, Midp…
Blake Snyder's Save the Cat is the most-used commercial-screenwriting template of the last twenty years. Fifteen beats, pinned to specific p…
Five-act is the classical shape of Greek tragedy and Shakespearean drama: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, resolution. Mod…
The Pixar Story Spine — credited to former Pixar story artist Emma Coats — is six fill-in-the-blank sentences that force you to say your sto…
Kishōtenketsu is the four-act structure used across Japanese, Chinese, and Korean narrative — Ki (introduction), Shō (development), Ten (twi…
Dan Wells's Seven-Point Structure is a writer's structure — it thinks in terms of character decisions, not page counts. Hook, Plot Turn 1, P…
Freytag's Pyramid is Gustav Freytag's 1863 dissection of five-act classical drama — exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, catas…
Chris Soth's Mini-Movie Method treats a feature as eight 12–15 page mini-movies, each with its own setup, conflict, and climax. It's a struc…
The TV Pilot beat sheet is a specialty structure — a pilot has to do more work than any other episode, introducing the world, the ensemble, …
The rom-com beat sheet is the genre's load-bearing structure — meet-cute, initial resistance, deepening, first declaration, breakup (the "da…
The thriller/mystery beat sheet is a twelve-beat structure built around a single question: does the audience know more than the protagonist,…
Sometimes you already know your shape — or you want to find it in the writing. The Blank Canvas is one beat, no frame, printed pretty. A sin…
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