Writer's Software

[Guest KevinKid]

I find it difficult to express all my ideas and the images I see in my mind in simple prose. Besides it's tedious for me to be writing << "," he said.>> when all I want is to focus on the essence of the story.

 

I've realized that writing a story in the format of screenplay allows me to focus more on the story and I can give better descriptions of everything, including point of views and camera angles. :2hands:

 

Can anyone recommend me an application for writing screenplays? If I can download it from somewhere, the better. Please don't just recommend me the first you find, but I'm actually asking people who have used one and can tell me his experience with it. :pickaxe:

 

Thank you so much

[TheZot]

I find it difficult to express all my ideas and the images I see in my mind in simple prose. Besides it's tedious for me to be writing << "," he said.>> when all I want is to focus on the essence of the story.

 

I've realized that writing a story in the format of screenplay allows me to focus more on the story and I can give better descriptions of everything, including point of views and camera angles. 

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Urf. It might be better for you as an author, but screenplay format's really hard to deal with as a reader. However...

 

There's no reason, if you've got a reasonable word processor at hand, that you can't work that way to start -- you don't really need screenplay-specific software to start, and you definitely don't want it if you're going to end up turning the the text into a regular story. Just... ingore your instincts when dealing with the word processor. You don't have to start at the beginning and work your way to the end. It's OK to skip around, it's just fine to leave off in the middle of a scene (or do bits and pieces of a scene that aren't as yet connected), and there's nothing to say that you can't be working on chapter 14 before you've finished (or even started) chapter 5.

 

That's how I work -- new scenes or parts get new files, if I'm not sure how to finish a scene (though I know what's going to happen) I leave off (usually leaving some notes so I don't forget) and I worry about patching it all up later.

 

You still do end up going back and working on hte hard transitions, or the dialog you're not quite sure how to do, or the descriptions that ought to get filled in, but you don't get hung up on things you're blocking on quite so much.

 

The tough part's getting everything finished up. That one I'm still working on. (Posting chapters seems to help with the motivation)

[EMoe57]

Something a little "unusual" to consider but most modern word processing software these days have macro capabilities that you might find useful. Macros have gotten bad press but are quite handy for repetitive text entry. Don't get hung up on it too much, it just records what you type and then plays it back each time you hit the key combination for the macro.

 

Even simpler version than a macro is MS Word's AutoCorrect feature. You can tell Word to replace one set of characters with another. Using your example, you could assign the letters HS to mean [," he said.] and when Word saw you type hs by itself, it would replace it with what is inside the brackets. Check the Help file for more details.

 

Finally, as TheZot pointed out, you don't have to labor over the details when you have a creative flow going. One writer told me he initially started each line of dialog with "character:" and then typed out the dialog not caring about punctuation or spelling. Then, when he was in that frame of mind, he'd go back and clean up the work, creating proper sentences and correcting punctuation and spelling.

 

The important thing to remember is to find what works for you. That is as true for the story content as it is for the final format. If you have the creative juices flowing but find yourself fighting the software, turn on a tape recorder and speak it out loud or grab a pen and write it down on paper

[JamesSavik]

I haven't come across anything that Mircosoft Word can't handle. As much as I hate Billy-boy, I got to give him his props for Word. I wish they would pay as much attention to their gimpy-assed non-operating systems.

[Guest bluesdreamer]

There are a lot of programs out there for writing, but as stated above you really can not beat MS Word. Now if you can not afford Word there is a "Open Source" program called "Open Office". It has all the similar type programs included as Microsoft Office does, but it is a free download. I will include a link at the bottom of this post.

 

Also having a good editor on board with you will help a lot.

 

Hugs

 

Blue

 

Open Office

[reapersharvest]

I'm a mac user, but I just use TextEdit and type in Plain Text format, so the submission process to Nifty is much easier and there are no copy/paste malfunctions.

[ethan thorn]

I use rough draft Its does a good job but there is no grammer check like MS word. But if i remember right rough draft can do RTF and html text its been so long since i played with RD to know for sure.