Story beat

A script gets built out of beats before it becomes sentences. Each one does a job: a question raised, a stake introduced, an attempt that fails, a piece of information that reframes what came before.

Writing the beats first tells you whether the video has a shape, and it tells you that while changing the shape is still cheap: an outline of 12 beats with three of them doing nothing is far easier to fix than a finished edit. Retention dips often trace back to a stretch with no beat in it. The video keeps talking and nothing moves for the viewer.