What a beat board is, and when to use one

In one line: what a beat board is made of — acts, beat cards, file cards — and how it differs from an outline document.

What it solves

By chapter eight you have eight chapter files, and every one of them contains decent prose. What you don't have is anywhere to look at the shape of the book. To see it you open the files one at a time and rebuild the line in your head.

A beat board (.beats) is that place. It puts your plan and your pages on the same board: the plan is beat cards, the pages are chapter cards you drag in from the file tree. Six beats in Act Two but only two chapters written, three turning points crowded into one act, a whole stretch of the middle with no cards on it — the board shows you that. The file tree can't.

A beat board is its own file (extension .beats) and opens in a tab. In the Ink Tide sample book it lives in the Notes folder as Story Skeleton.beats.

Three layers on one board

Act (a column, named by you)
  Beat card (title + summary — it's allowed to be only an idea)
     File card (chapter .md)
     File card (script .script)
  File card (sitting straight in the act, in no beat)
Unassigned (cards with no act, or whose act was deleted — its own column)

• Acts are the columns. You name them; the app does not hand you a fixed three. The column header shows that act's beat count, file count and word count.
• Beat cards are the plan: a title and a one-line summary. An empty one is legitimate — it means you've thought of it and haven't written it.
• File cards are your pages. You drag them in from the file tree and they point at the real file. The name on the card is always the file's current name, so renaming in the tree renames the card.

The Ink Tide board is three acts, 14 beat cards and 12 chapter cards. "Rising Pressure" in Act Two carries two chapters — Chapter 08 (Pei Zhao) and Chapter 09 (Lamplight) — because that beat took two chapters to write.

The small print on the right of a beat card

Each beat card shows one status, and it is the most useful cell on the whole board:

• Has files → the combined word count of everything under that beat. Collapse the beat and it also shows how many files.
• Has no files → Not written yet.

So "planned but unwritten" is not something you have to track in a separate to-do list. Four of the 14 beats on the Ink Tide board read Not written yet: Hesitation, Subplot, Reflection, Final Image. The first three say why in their own summaries — they're folded between chapters rather than given one — and the last one simply hasn't been reached.

Only chapters and scripts go on the board

Drag a file in from the tree and exactly two kinds will land:

1. text files marked as manuscript (.md)
2. script files (.script)

Characters, locations, reference files, relationship maps, timelines and world maps will not — you get Only chapters and scripts can go on the board. The reason is that this board measures progress, and only manuscript has progress to measure. For what counts as manuscript and how to change it, see Manuscript vs reference.

Script cards do one extra thing: they expand into a scene list, one row per scene. Useful when the question is "how many scenes in this episode and how long is each" — see Writing a script in Slima.

How it differs from an outline document

The Notes folder of Ink Tide holds both Outline.md and Story Skeleton.beats. Both are about structure, and they are not the same thing:

They don't compete, and plenty of authors keep both: the outline for the thinking, the board as the progress gauge.

One more division of labour worth remembering: the board does not own the file tree's order. Drag Chapter 09 above Chapter 08 on the board and nothing moves in the tree — and the reverse is also true. Board order is story order, tree order is file order, and they are deliberately separate.

The AI can read it, and change it — but you accept the change

The chat can read this board: the acts, every beat's title and summary, which file each card points at, and each one's word count. So you can just ask whether Act Two is slack, and it is looking at your real board rather than at your paraphrase of it.

It can also restructure — add an act, add or move a beat, rewrite a summary, reorder. But it never does that on its own: you ask, and what comes back arrives as pending on the board. A pill appears with the number of pending changes; you take them one at a time with Accept or Skip, or use Accept all in this file. Until you do, the board's data is unchanged.

There is one more guard: the AI cannot touch file cards at all. It can move a beat and it can delete a beat, but the chapter and script cards you placed are outside what it operates on — delete a beat and the file cards inside it stay in the same act as loose cards. They don't vanish, and your files are never deleted. See Reviewing AI edits.

On a phone

Editable, just without dragging: beat cards and file cards move inside their container with ▲▼, and anything across acts or in and out of beats goes through Move to… on the card. Editing a title or summary opens a bottom sheet.

When not to use it

• You only want to break one chapter into sections. Those are headings inside the chapter — use the Outline panel instead of opening a board.
• You want to record when events happened. That's a timeline. A beat board handles order, not dates.
• A 30,000-word novella. Three acts and six beats can end up longer than the book. A board earns its keep by making something visible that you couldn't see; while the book is small you can already see it.

Related

• Docs: Create and arrange beats and acts
• Docs: Choosing one of the four structure templates
• Docs: File tree overview
• Docs: Manuscript vs reference
• Docs: Relationship map
• Docs: How word count works