The story bible, before a single page.
Changing the midpoint on a card takes a minute. Changing it in a written draft takes a week. So BeatBandit keeps the big decisions on cards, where they're cheap to change, and every later stage reads from them.
Characters that carry the writing
A character isn't just a name and an age. Each card holds what the writing needs to make them specific: the wound that drives them, a physical clue to it, their flaw, their arc, how they talk, and the texture: habits and objects that make a person feel real.
Those fields aren't decoration. The Writer later receives each scene's focal character's speaking style, and the details travel into the pages.
He'll knock. Three. So you know it's me.
A cast designed together
Characters are written as a set, so no two of them sound alike. Each one gets a way of speaking the Writer has to follow. From Station One, exactly as generated:
Later, Writing Vitals measures whether the pages kept the promise. See Ines's numbers →
An opponent with a plan
Pressure on the hero should escalate for reasons, not by coincidence. So the opposition gets a plan with five parts. Station One's flight director:
Look back at the scene chain below: the hatch lockout and the camera restriction are steps two of this plan, arriving on schedule.
34 beats, four acts
Opening Image to Closing Image, via Wound Reveal, Pinch Points, Gate / Gauntlet and Dark Night. The eight that matter most sit on one Key Beats screen.
Stakes in three layers
What the hero loses inside, what they lose in the world, and what the story is arguing about. Station One's: guilt, a capsule and a deadline, and whether surviving means forgetting.
Lenses
Ten cards for looking at the story from another angle: three kinds of stakes, a real dilemma ("zero safe compromise"), revelations, the 3–7 setups the audience must not forget, and the texture of the world.