Stormboard Beat Board Templates for Screenplays and Novels

Use a Save the Cat or 5-Act template

In the creative writing world, there are Pantsers and Planners. Pantsers write their story by the seat of their pants with no outline. Whereas Planners will create an outline or beat board, often using the Save the Cat beats or another proven framework.

Stormboard has great news for both of you! Planners, we now offer free templates to create your beat boards! We have the classic Save the Cat 3-act beat board, or a 5-act beat board. As for Pantsers, these templates are still free and can help you in the second draft/editing stage.

You can download them right now by clicking these links:

Save the Cat: 3-Act Beat Board (Free to use)

5-Act Beat Board (Also free!)

Save the Cat. Save Time. Save Every Single Idea.

A lot of writers really enjoy the beat boarding process. Whether or not you enjoy it, you almost certainly find it helpful. You get to lay your story (whatever stage it’s at) out in a visual in a tactile way. This can help you see where the story is going, where the gaps are, what could be slowing you down, and what simply doesn’t belong.

Novelists and screenwriters have been doing this for years — filling whiteboards with ink, filling corkboards with cards and sticky notes, or even filling glass patio doors with both.

The system seems to work, so why digitize it? Well, if you’ve ever gone through the process of building an analog beat board, you know the process isn’t perfect.

Most notably:

It's messy and time consuming

You’re limited by the size of the board/space

Sticky notes are not great to write on... And they fall... A lot

Whiteboards smear, especially if you’re left-handed (any other lefties out there? Unite!)

There are also three other major drawbacks that not enough people talk about.

When you’re finally done, you need to try to capture the chaos. In most cases, the best you can do is take a picture and hope that some scenes aren’t lost to glare from the light, or sloppy handwriting (again, my lefties, where you at?).
Collaborating with other people on the beat board is amazing when you’re all in the same room, but completely impossible when you’re not.
That’s incredibly limiting, particularly when you’re trying to bring someone in to help diagnose why the story isn’t working. You need to physically bring them in, or send them a photo of the board with your WIP document and hope they can make sense of it.
Ideas are lost if they don’t make the final board. The stickies and cards that don’t make the cut get crumpled up and thrown out.

However, among all of those crumpled-up “bad ideas,” there is often a hint, piece, or nugget of a really good idea that you wish you could have back later. It happens more than we like, and there is no Recover or Undo button in the analogue world.

How Stormboard’s Beat Boards Can Help

What if you could keep all of the visual and tactile elements of seeing the big pictures and moving scenes from one place to another, while still adding the advantages of a digital tool?

Stormboard’s templates allow you to:

Map it ALL out: Your board is unlimited in size, with an unlimited number of sticky notes. Move stickies around, move them back. Color code and name them as you please.

Keep it clear: Digital stickies don’t smear or fall, and they’re not reliant on handwriting.

Collaborate: You can instantly share your live board and invite other writers or editors to collaborate in real time.

Keep it all: Your board (we call it a ‘Storm’) can travel with you wherever you go! You can revisit your work at any time on nearly any device via the cloud. You don’t need to rely on a picture.

You can also recover trashed sticky notes to find those discarded ideas. Or even better, you don’t need to throw them out. You can just drag them off the storyline.

Not a fan of Save the Cat or 5-act structures? You can customize either of these templates however you like! You can add/remove/ rename as many facts or sticky notes as you see fit. There are no limits.

And let us know what type of beat board template you would like us to create!

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