Story beat analysisSee your whole plot on one line

Story beats are the moments that move a story forward: a decision, a revelation, a reversal, an event that changes what a character can do next. Familiar finds the beats in your manuscript, says which chapter each falls in and what job it does in the story, and marks whether it comes from a character’s choice or from something that happens to them.

Familiar reads the whole manuscript and lists its beats in order, usually at least one for each chapter and 20 to 30 for a novel. Each beat comes with its chapter, a short summary, its narrative function (inciting incident, decision point, revelation, climax), whether it is character-driven or external, and whether it follows or subverts the conventions of your genre. Then it looks at each pair of consecutive beats and says how they connect: Therefore, But, Because, or And then, with a sentence explaining why.

Readers keep turning pages when each event causes the next or complicates it. A run of beats joined by “and then” is where a story starts to feel episodic, and a long stretch of external beats is where your characters stop driving it. The beat map shows both at a glance, so you can find the stretch that drags before a reader does.

Yes. Seeing every beat on one line shows things that are hard to notice reading chapter by chapter: links that are only sequence, chapters where nothing a character chooses changes the story, a midpoint that arrives late. You can revise the chapters that need it, upload the new draft and run the analysis again to compare.

A character-driven beat starts with a character: a choice, a realization, a change of heart. An external beat is something that happens to them: an attack, a storm, another character’s move. Most stories need both, with outside events pressing on the characters and their choices moving the plot. The map puts the two in separate lanes so you can see the balance across the book.

Each run costs 2 credits, and credits are $5 each, so a run is $10. Every plan includes credits each month to spend on runs like this. Story beats are also part of Analyze Everything, which runs eight analyses on a manuscript together for 12 credits, 20% less than running them one at a time.