Create and arrange beats and acts

In one line: create a beat board from the file tree, add acts and beats, drag things into order, attach chapter files to beats — and understand exactly what each kind of "delete" deletes.

Create a beat board

At the bottom of the file tree there's a dashed Add Content button. Press it and a flat list opens — all eight things you can create sit in one level, nothing collapsed, nothing further to expand:

New Manuscript, New Reference, New Folder, New Relationship Map, New Script, New Map, New Timeline, New beat board.

The beat board is the last item.

1. Press Add Content at the bottom of the file tree
2. Choose the last entry in the list, New beat board

The file arrives named Untitled beat board with the extension .beats, and it lands at the top level of the file tree — not in whichever folder you had selected. To tuck it into a folder, drag it there afterwards. Renaming works like any other file: double-click the name. In the Ink Tide sample book it sits in the Notes folder, renamed to Story Skeleton.

A fresh board is empty, and the middle of it offers four structure templates plus a Start blank link. Picking a template is covered in Choosing one of the four structure templates; this article assumes you pressed Start blank, or that you're adding to a board you already have.

Add an act

At the far end of the board there's a column with a single dashed Add an act button. Press it and you get another column, named New act to begin with.

Click the act name to rename it in place (on a phone a sheet slides up instead). The names are entirely yours: Ink Tide uses the ones its template supplied — Act One (Setup), Act Two (Confrontation), Act Three (Resolution) — but "First half", "Everything breaks" and "Tie it off" would work just as well.

Each column header shows that act's beat count, file count and word count. That header is the first number to look at when you're asking whether an act has grown fat.

An act column, and the column after the last act

The header of an act column

• The act's name, on the leading edge — click it to rename
• Then three bare numbers separated by ·: beats, files, then the word count with its unit
• Hover them and a tooltip names them in that order
• A ✕ appears on hover — delete this act; the beats inside are kept and become unassigned
• At the foot of the column: Add beat

Add an act

• A dashed column sitting past the last act, holding only this button
• It gives you a fresh column called New act

Only the numbers are on screen — the words “beats” and “files” live in the tooltip. Read them left to right in that order.

Add beats

At the bottom of every column there's Add beat. Press it and a card appears, titled New beat, with an empty summary that prompts Add a summary….

• Title and summary are both edited in place — no dialog (a phone opens a bottom sheet).
• One sentence is enough for a summary. The Midpoint card in Ink Tide opens with "The blank stele drinks words — the first corner of the Ink Tide calamity turns out to be men and not heaven." That's the whole job of the beat, said once.
• A beat card is allowed to stay empty. It will show Not written yet on its edge, which is exactly what it should show.

Drag things into order (desktop)

The whole card is a drag handle — you don't have to hunt for a grip. Where you drop it decides what happens:

What you drag	Where you drop it	What happens
A file from the tree / a file card on the board	empty space in an act column	becomes the last loose card in that act (in no beat)
same	onto the face of a beat card	goes into that beat, last (the whole card lights up with a ring)
same	on the top or bottom edge of another card	inserts at that position
A beat card	empty space in an act column, or above/below another card	changes act and inserts there
A scene, inside an expanded script card	between the scenes of the same script	reorders scenes in that script
same	onto another script card's scene list	moves the scene into that other script

Two things worth knowing up front:

• Beats never nest. Drag a beat card onto another beat card and it does not become a sub-beat; it inserts before or after it.
• Moving scenes really edits the script. That isn't board data, it's the contents of a .script file, so Slima takes an automatic checkpoint first and you can find the earlier state in version history.

Attach chapter files to a beat

Drag a chapter straight from the file tree onto a beat card. Once the card exists:

• The card shows the file's current name. Rename it in the tree and the card follows.
• It works the other way too: rename the file from the card. That renames the real file (same folder, extension untouched). If the folder already has that name you get Rename failed — a file with that name may already exist.
• Open on the card jumps to that file's tab so you can write in it.
• A file appears on the board at most once. Dragging moves, it doesn't copy, so you can't end up with two Chapter 05 cards.

If a file won't land you'll see Only chapters and scripts can go on the board — characters, locations, references, relationship maps, timelines and world maps are all out. See Manuscript vs reference.

When there are too many cards

• Acts and beats each collapse on their own.
• Two floating buttons in the bottom corner: Collapse all and Expand all, which fold every beat and every script's scene list at once.
• The scroll wheel over empty board space scrolls sideways, which beats dragging a scrollbar once you have several columns.

Arranging on a phone

There's no dragging on a phone. Two entry points replace it:

• ▲▼ moves a card up and down inside its own container — within an act, or within a beat.
• Move to… moves it across containers. The sheet lists every act and beat on the board; file cards get two extras, Move out of beat and Remove from board, and a scene gets Move to script….

What each delete deletes

This is the part that trips people up. "Remove" on the board and "Delete" in the file tree are not the same operation.

Related

• Docs: What a beat board is, and when to use one
• Docs: Choosing one of the four structure templates
• Docs: File tree operations
• Docs: Manuscript vs reference
• Docs: Browse version history & diff
• Docs: Writing a script in Slima