Pick a story structure and a target length to see where every beat should land, by word count, page and chapter. Copy the table or download it as a CSV.
Typical range 80,000–90,000 words
The middle of the genre’s typical range; change it to your target
Leave blank to hide the chapter column. Assumes equal-length chapters.
Beats
15
Save the Cat (15 beats)
Pages (6 × 9)
≈ 278
About 330 words a page, before front matter
Words per chapter
3,542
24 chapters
| Beat | % of book | Word | Page | Chapter |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Opening Image A snapshot of the hero and their world before anything changes. | 0–1% | 1–850 | 1–3 | 1 |
| Setup The hero’s everyday life, flaws, wants and the people around them. | 1–10% | 850–8,500 | 3–28 | 1–3 |
| Theme Stated Someone hints at the lesson the hero needs to learn, though the hero doesn’t see it yet. | 5% | 4,250 | 14 | 2 |
| Catalyst The event that knocks the hero’s life off course. | 10% | 8,500 | 28 | 3 |
| Debate The hero hesitates, resists or weighs what to do about it. | 10–20% | 8,500–17,000 | 28–56 | 3–5 |
| Break Into 2 The hero chooses to act and steps into a new situation, the upside-down world of act two. | 20% | 17,000 | 56 | 5 |
| Fun and Games The premise in action: the scenes the book’s cover promises. | 20–50% | 17,000–42,500 | 56–139 | 5–13 |
| B Story A new relationship begins that will carry the theme, often a friend, mentor or love interest. | 22% | 18,700 | 62 | 6 |
| Midpoint A false victory or false defeat raises the stakes and changes the hero’s course. | 50% | 42,500 | 139 | 13 |
| Bad Guys Close In Pressure builds from outside and from the hero’s own flaws. | 50–75% | 42,500–63,750 | 139–209 | 13–19 |
| All Is Lost The worst moment. Something or someone is lost, and the hero’s old way is finished. | 75% | 63,750 | 209 | 19 |
| Dark Night of the Soul The hero sits with the loss before finding what they really need. | 75–80% | 63,750–68,000 | 209–223 | 19–20 |
| Break Into 3 An insight, often from the B story, gives the hero a new plan. | 80% | 68,000 | 223 | 20 |
| Finale The hero carries out the plan, proving they have changed. | 80–99% | 68,000–84,150 | 223–276 | 20–24 |
| Final Image A mirror of the opening image that shows how far the hero has come. | 99–100% | 84,150–85,000 | 276–278 | 24 |
Beat names from Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat! (2005). Percentages follow Jessica Brody’s adaptation for novels (2018). The descriptions are our own summaries. Sources: Blake Snyder, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need (Michael Wiese Productions, 2005); Jessica Brody, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel (Ten Speed Press, 2018), which converts Snyder’s screenplay page numbers into percentages of a novel. Placements are guides, not rules.
All three structures describe the same underlying shape: a stable world is disrupted, the protagonist commits, the middle turns, things fall apart, and a final choice resolves it. They differ in how many checkpoints they give you and what they call them. The positions are the commonly taught placements, not measurements of any particular set of books.
| Moment | Three-act | Save the Cat | Hero’s journey |
|---|---|---|---|
| Disruption | Inciting incident, 10% | Catalyst, 10% | Call to Adventure, 10% |
| Commitment | Plot point 1, 25% | Break Into 2, 20% | Crossing the First Threshold, 25% |
| Turn in the middle | Midpoint, 50% | Midpoint, 50% | Ordeal, about 50% |
| Lowest point | Plot point 2, 75% | All Is Lost, 75% | The Road Back, about 75% |
| Final test | Climax, about 90% | Finale, 80–99% | Resurrection, about 88% |
A beat sheet is most useful at two moments: before you start, to check the plan has a shape, and after a first draft, to find out why the middle feels slow. In both cases the calculator gives you the target; the work is comparing it to where things actually happen.
The chapter column assumes chapters of equal length, which real books rarely have, so treat it as a neighbourhood rather than an address. If your chapters vary a lot, the word column is the more reliable guide: keep a running total of your chapter lengths and look for the chapter where the total passes each beat’s word position. The CSV download puts start and end words, pages and chapters in separate columns, so you can paste it into a spreadsheet next to your own chapter list and add a column for what actually happens at each point. Revising, that column is often the fastest way to see which beat is missing.
The outline guide How to Outline a Novel in an Afternoon shows a quick way to turn these beats into a chapter plan, and if you are still looking for the story itself, the story idea generator gives you premises with loglines to test against the beats.
The placements are averages, and good books depart from them all the time. A thriller may open on its catalyst in the first paragraph; a literary novel may spend a third of its length before anything visibly changes; a romance often has two midpoints, one for each lead. What the structure is really asking is whether each part of the book does its job, not whether it starts on the right page.
Some useful rules of thumb when a beat lands far from its target:
Not sure how long your book should be in the first place? The book word count by genre table gives sourced ranges for every major category; the genre presets above use the middle of those ranges.
In Anthra, the agentic book creator drafts a beat sheet and a chapter-by-chapter outline from your premise, and you can move, cut or rewrite any beat before a word of the book is written. It then drafts each chapter against that plan, with continuity checks across the book, and stops for your approval before any step that costs credits.
The beat and stage names belong to the authors credited above; the descriptions in the calculator are our own summaries.
A list of the key moments, or beats, in a story, in order, with a rough position for each. It sits between a one-line premise and a full chapter outline: enough to check the shape of the book before you write it, without fixing every scene.
Around halfway, as the name suggests: in an 80,000-word novel, near word 40,000. All three structures here put a major turn at about 50%. What matters more than the exact position is that something changes there, so the second half is not a repeat of the first.
Blake Snyder wrote the beat sheet for screenplays, with page numbers for a 110-page script. Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel converts those positions into percentages of a book, which is what this calculator uses: the catalyst at about 10%, break into two at 20%, midpoint at 50%, all is lost at 75% and break into three at 80%.
No. They are averages drawn from many stories, and published books move beats by several percent either way. Use the table to spot big gaps, such as an inciting incident at 30% or a midpoint at 70%, rather than to force a scene onto a particular page.
From the same model as our page count calculator: a 6 × 9 inch trim with a standard 11 pt layout, about 330 words a page, plus a little space at each chapter opening. Front matter is not counted, so page 1 is the first page of the story.
Whichever helps you think. Three-act is the simplest check. Save the Cat gives more checkpoints and suits commercial genre fiction. The hero’s journey suits quest and coming-of-age stories. Many writers try their outline against two of them and see which one exposes a weak spot.
Anthra’s AI agent plans the outline, writes every chapter, illustrates it from your locked character details, narrates the audiobook and exports EPUB, PDF and a print-ready paperback. Start with free welcome credits, no card required.