I’m new to Scrivener and would like to tweak the UK stage play template to enable me to break up dialogue into separate lines on pressing return while writing in ‘Character & Dialogue’, as in the below example:
TOBY: I knew it
who do they even let in?
ALEX: You’re supposed to talk to him
flirt or something
TOBY: It’s fine
I don’t want to
RILEY: You need to let him know you’re like
here for the right reasons
that you belong
I think an important establishing question is what formatting you are ultimately going for, beyond that adjustment. For instance, will the format of character name and dialogue still be essentially the same, only without the first line containing both character name and first line of dialogue?
If so, then try this out first:
Switch to Character & Dialogue and type in the character name.
Press Return, and then Tab to switch to Dialogue (Cont.), and type in some dialogue.
Is that the look you want? If so, the following checklist will help you make that small tweak:
Simple return fix...
Go into Format ▸ Scriptwriting ▸ Script Settings....
Optional to make the cosmetics better, double click on the “Character & Dialogue” and “Dialogue (Cont.)” names in the sidebar, and give them better titles.
I’ll use “Character” and “Dialogue” in the following examples.
Select “Character” entry in the sidebar.
Where you change return and tab behaviour is in the “Tab/Return” tab, funnily enough!
Set On return, at the very top, to “Dialogue”. If you are still asked to put a colon after the name, you may want to check that setting right below the dropdown.
For the Tab settings you could do whatever you want, maybe have it switch to Action instead, and delete the contents of the Insert field.
For further adjustments, such as to the formatting itself, you’re still in the right place, but will want to explore the first two tabs more completely.
Important: this adjustment is one of the few cases where Scrivener’s script conversion utility may not do a good job of converting. It is designed to change the formatting of each line, not split lines at arbitrary places, or merge them (that would be very difficult to do correctly). So this is definitely the sort of tweak that is better done before you start writing much, as you may need to manually reformat the text that has reverted to “General”, or otherwise fix whatever looks wrong.
It looks like you are wanting to break lines to indicate phrasing. I don’t know where you are going with your end result and none of what I am about to say may be relevant to your use case – in which case please studiously ignore all! Here are three considerations.
Line breaking like that would be highly unorthodox in a script – which would likely be unwelcome in a professional setting and would likely effect how your script is perceived. Or at least I would think so. I am not the expert here.[*]
Actors also may not take kindly to being dictated to in this way.
You might inadvertently be building yourself a crutch. One of the challenges of writing is writing sentences in such way that they read naturally with the intended phrasing and emphasis. To demand this of oneself improves one’s writing.
[*] In canonical script format standards there is supposed to be a rough correspondence between page length and duration as staged/filmed. This is one of the things you would be messing with by line breaking as you intend.
