How many beats per scene do I need?
Talking about how to use scene beats in Novelcrafter.
1 min read Last updated Jan 16, 2025
There is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answer for this question; once more it relates to your workflow, and how you like to write your beats. With some of the larger models, it is now possible to write an entire scene with one ‘beat’, if the beat has a scene’s worth of information in it.
For those of you who are wanting to work in beats still, or have found that AI models don’t give you enough prose for a one-shot, here are some things to consider.
- How long are the scenes that you want to write? This might differ, based on genre, target audience.
- How many words do you want to write per beat? If you prefer to have more control over the output, it might be that you want to have more beats, but that they are smaller. If you enjoy letting AI have more space for creativity, then it might be that you want to have fewer beats.
The system prompt currently asks for 400 words. If you wish to have a higher or lower word output, you will need to tweak the prompt. We have documentation on how to do this here.