bartleby

not only am i having an i-would-prefer-not-to week, but i am trying to bust through it with new software, namely Scrivener, a nifty writing tool from literature and latte, a programmer who professes not to be a software company. it's mac only. (holy cow, have i really made the switch? i typed that "mac only" with an odd indifference, like of course this software i'm using doesn't run on windows. i don't think there's any getting around it, i'm a freaking mac user. but that is a subject for another post.)

so far, scrivener's turning out to be pretty cool. i've had the usual whoa, new software! issues (there's something about dragging links into a blank document that makes it impossible to write unlinked text in there--impossible for me, anyhow) but the workflow feels pretty solid. (oh, man, there's that mac-talk again.) you pull in notes from wherever and then do an index-card sort of thing in the "corkboard" and then go to town.

i've used scrivener for a couple of small projects--not scripts, brainstorming pitches for orange avenue/zest--so the real test comes now, when i pull notes and random bits of research for Sky in to see if i can't rework some major pieces of the project.

will report back in a few days.

surf the afternoon away

uk writer and script reader bang2write hooks you up with a gazillion articles online:

write here, write now's required reading

great advice or fodder for "productive" procrastination? you be the judge.

then everyone would do it

there's no way to say this without sounding like a moron, so i'll just say it: writing a decent script is hard. insanely hard.

here's my anecdotal evidence:

i'm now semi-officially meeting with two different writing groups. each has 6-7 writers in it, give or take a few, and in each group i'm talking about people with no small degree of experience. these aren't people who just decided to give screenwriting a try as a get-rich-quick scheme; we're talking experienced filmmakers in one group and seasoned actors/playwrights in the other.

everyone is struggling with something. one gets her characters figured out, but plot--who knows? another can hammer out a plot like nobody's business, but worries that the characters feel like stereotypes. and almost nobody is comfortable with those other pieces that are supposed to magically appear with their scripts: the one-sheet, the treatments, the dreaded log lines.

writing a script is like a decathlon--you've got to be pretty damn good at so many different things.

but if it was easy...

ever heard of plato, aristotle, ...?

not socrates--sophocles!

(but for some reason i can't get vizzini out of my head this week--thank you, wallace shawn.)

sophocles isn't just the name of the guy who wrote antigone, it's also the name of my favorite screenwriting program.

for ages i stuck with my own word templates (years of tech writing have left me with an absurd comfort level with ms word tweaks), and swore i'd never fork over the money for final draft or its ilk. then i won a copy of gorilla software at an sf cutters meeting last year and started playing with a trial copy of frameforge, and got this crazy idea that i needed final draft because it pipes into software that expects "industry standard" scripts.

for the life of me, i couldn't use final draft. it does this crazy thing where the pagination gets screwy and you can't see the line that's at the bottom of the page (older versions of word used to do this, like word 2.0 or something). and the famed index cards aren't tied to the script in a way that makes sense to me. weird things happened when i saved files. these strange bugs kept coming up--and not just in windows, but on a mac, too. i couldn't believe that this program "everyone" uses was so half-baked. $183.50 down the drain.

but then i found sophocles. it's like this program was designed for me, the screenwriter who knows enough about computers to be driven mad by software that doesn't work.

one of the biggest innovations in sophocles is that the program doesn't force you to look at your script in official script format on the screen. this may seem weird at first, but think about it: you don't need a script to be in a narrow column with courier font until you're printing it out. sophocles lets you look at your script in any font you want, with dialog stretching across the window so you can see more than a couple of lines at a time. the program also estimates running times for scenes and the whole script, so you don't need to keep on top of the one-minute-per-page estimate (unless you want to). when you print, sophocles converts the whole shebang into the right format. excellent.

then there are these great tools for analyzing what you have written. you can see an outline, of course, and notes you've added for each scene--obvious stuff. but sophocles will also tell you who has the most lines in the script, and how much any two characters interact with each other. it will list all of your settings, and how many scenes take place in each. you can find out how long your average scenes are or how much dialog you have compared to stage direction. and that's just the start.

you can print straight from sophocles, export to pdf, or export to rtf, which you can import into final draft if you're set on tagging. i only use final draft as a staging area for getting scripts to other programs or other people who only have final draft--never for actual writing.

and, yes, i boot into windows just to write--sophocles is pc-only. (yay, boot camp!)