Beat sheet calculator
A beat sheet pins fifteen turns to a share of the book. At 90,000 words, the midpoint lands near word 45,000 and the lowest point near 62,000. Enter your own length, and a chapter count if you have one, for every beat's word.
Your beats, word by word
Fifteen beats from the opening image to the closing one.
| Act or beat | Position | Word |
|---|---|---|
| Act One The world as it is, and the thing that ends it. | 0% | 0 |
| Opening Image The first picture of the world, before anything has moved. It is there to be answered by the last one. | 1% | 1,000 |
| Theme Introduced Someone says what the story is about, usually in passing, and usually without knowing it. | 5% | 4,500 |
| Setup The ordinary life, drawn well enough that losing it will cost something. | 9% | 8,000 |
| Inciting Incident The thing that happens to them. Not chosen, and not undoable. | 11% | 10,000 |
| Hesitation They argue with it — refuse, delay, look for another way out. The last of the old life. | 16% | 14,500 |
| First Turning Point They choose to go. The door closes behind them and the story proper begins. | 23% | 20,500 |
| Second Thread Opens A second line opens — a relationship, a rival, a subplot — that will carry the theme. | 27% | 24,500 |
| Act Two The new world: the promise of the premise, then the bill for it. | 33% | 30,000 |
| Rising Complications The stretch the story was sold on: the new world worked through, before the cost arrives. | 41% | 37,000 |
| Midpoint The middle turns. A false victory or a false defeat, and from here the pressure only rises. | 50% | 45,000 |
| Forces Close In Everything that opposes them tightens at once, inside and out. | 61% | 55,000 |
| Act Three What they do with what they learned. | 67% | 60,000 |
| Lowest Point They lose the thing that mattered. Often someone dies, or something does. | 69% | 62,000 |
| The Long Night The stillness after the loss, where they face what they have been avoiding the whole way. | 72% | 65,000 |
| Second Turning Point What they learned in the dark gives them the answer. They go back in, changed. | 77% | 69,500 |
| Finale They act on it, and the opposition is beaten for real this time. | 88% | 79,000 |
| Closing Image The opening image again, and different. This is the proof that the change was real. | 99% | 89,000 |
Where do my chapters start?
| Chapter | Starts at | Word |
|---|
Do I have to hit each beat on its word?
No. The marks say where a reader starts to expect a turn, not where the turn must sit. A beat a few thousand words early rarely matters. One that arrives a tenth of the book late usually does, because the stretch before it has nothing to do.
Use the table after a draft as much as before one. Find where your midpoint actually happens, compare it with the mark, and you know whether the first half runs long.
What if my book follows another structure?
Change the Structure menu. The same calculator places the romance beat sheet, three-act structure, the hero's journey, and the rest, and the address changes with it so you can bookmark the one you use.
New to beat sheets altogether? What is a beat sheet? walks one classic novel through the marks. The story shapes guide gives every beat's job in a line.
Turn the table into an outline
Tabularia can start a Book with these beats already in place: one chapter per beat, or your own count, each beat marked on its own timeline, and your length set as the Total goal. Nothing is created until you title the Book and press Create, and the beats come off again without touching a word of prose.
Try it on your own manuscript
Nothing is metered: as many projects as you like at any length, the outline and minimap to move through them, drafts and markup mode for revising, snapshots to return to, sheets and timelines beside the page, and export to DOCX, PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, plain text and Fountain. Bring in what you have already written and read it back as a book.
The Cloud plan is $18 a month, or $172.80 a year, and adds backup, sync across your devices, sharing a manuscript for review, and publishing your work as a web page — the readers and collaborators you invite do not need a paid account of their own. Tabularia is in Public Beta and shipping steadily; the release notes record what has landed.