Frame One

Index cards are one of the oldest tools in screenwriting. Write a unit of story on a card, pin it to a wall, and you can move, cut and replace pieces of your script without touching a single page.

The method is simple. The hard part is a decision most writers make without noticing: how big should each card be? A card can hold a beat, a scene or a sequence. Each size shows you something different about your story, and each one hides something too.

The three units

Beat. The smallest unit. A beat is a single moment of change: a decision, a discovery, a reaction, a shift in power between two characters. A beat can last a few seconds. A scene usually contains several.

Scene. Continuous action in one place and time, the thing that starts with a slugline. A scene is where a character pursues something and meets resistance. In a feature, you will typically have somewhere between 40 and 70.

Sequence. A group of connected scenes built around one goal. The character wants something, runs into obstacles, and the block ends with a result that pushes the story into the next one. A sequence runs roughly 10 to 15 minutes of screen time. Paul Gulino’s book Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach divides a feature into about eight of them.

The numbers above are rough guides, not rules. Scene counts and sequence lengths change with genre, running time and the writer’s style, so treat them as a starting point rather than a target.

A quick note on vocabulary: “beat” is used in two ways. Here it means a small moment of change inside a scene, the way actors and directors use it. Books like Save the Cat use “beat” for the major plot points of a story. Same word, different size. Keep this in mind when comparing advice from different sources.

Cards by beat

Pros

• Maximum control. You can see exactly where something changes and where nothing does.
• It is the best tool for repairing a scene that does not work.
• It forces you to ask what each moment is for.

Cons

• The numbers get big fast. Hundreds of cards are hard to hold in your head.
• You can lose the shape of the whole story while managing the details.
• It is slow to build a full outline this way.

Cards by scene

Pros

• Cards map directly to pages, so the outline turns into a draft with little translation.
• Easy to count, move and cut.
• This is the unit most working writers use for their main outline.

Cons

• Sixty strong scenes do not guarantee a strong structure. The rhythm of the whole is hard to read at this size.
• Scene cards often describe what happens and skip why it matters.

Cards by sequence

Pros

• Structure and pacing are visible at a glance, with only eight to ten cards on the table.
• Each sequence has its own goal and stakes, which keeps long stretches of the script from going slack.
• It is fast. You can outline a full story in an afternoon.

Cons

• Problems hide inside the sequence. A card can sound strong while the scenes underneath it are weak.
• Cards tend to stay vague. “The hero prepares” is not yet a story.
• You still need a second pass before you can start writing pages.

One example at three sizes

In Top Gun: Maverick, the stretch where Maverick trains the young pilots works as a sequence. Its goal is clear: prepare a team for a nearly impossible mission. On a sequence card, that is one line.

Inside it, the beach football game is a scene. It has a place, a time and an arc of its own.

Inside the scene, the moment where the pilots stop competing against each other and start playing as a team is a beat. It is a small shift, but it is the reason the scene exists.

The sequence card tells you what the stretch is for. The scene card tells you what is on the page. The beat tells you why the scene works.

Which size should you use?

It depends on the question you are asking.

• Sequences when you are building structure and checking rhythm.
• Scenes when you are planning the draft page by page.
• Beats when a specific scene is not working and you need to find out why.

Using all three

Most writers end up working in layers. Start with sequences: get the whole story onto eight to ten cards and check that each has a goal, an obstacle and a result. Once the shape holds, break each sequence into scene cards. Go down to beats only where a scene is failing.

You get the overview first, and the detail only where it earns its place. And since cards work in every part of the story, the same method applies to Act One, the middle and the ending alike.

No size is correct in itself. The skill is knowing which question you are asking, and picking the card that answers it.

Chapter 4 of The Screenwriting Series, “Working in Beats and Sequences With Cards,” goes deeper into this method, with a full worked example from Top Gun: Maverick. The Short Guide and the Deep Dive are available on the Courses page at frame1one.com.