Think of it this way: it’s like showing up for a pro cricket match with a baseball bat. They won’t let you play. You may be a real artist with that bat, but they won’t let you play, because entry to the competition is limited by certain requirements. Hollywood is the same way. Overall, ability trumps all, but you can’t compete unless you get past the entry gate. And the gatekeepers check format first, because it’s fast and easy.
At the risk of causing frickin’ killer laser beams to erupt from KB’s eyes, I must respectfully disagree.
Scrivener has very nearly the right amount of screenplay functionality. It lacks two crucial features for writing a professional Hollywood screenplay:
Action paragraphs with a hard right margin, and some kind of indicator of the 54th line of a page.
Keith may or may not at some point in time (to be determined later) address the hard right margin. He will NOT show us the end of the page. Never. Maybe.
So my disagreement with you is, like arguing with a studio executive, largely for my own diversion and a complete waste of time. Because Scrivener has exactly as much screenwriting functionality as it has.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. LA is lousy with Brits, Euros and NYers complaining about how bad it is, but none of them are moving back home.
Let me tell you about LA: the sunsets are gorgeous, the weather is great, beautiful creative people from all over the world migrate here, petrol is cheaper, and any kid can parlay their summer internship into a three-picture deal at Warners. Try that in Prague.
I don’t know, popcorn, I kind of like freewriting in Scrivener for the first draft. Not knowing where I am in the true page count frees me from the anxiety of not hitting certain structure goals.*
Frankly, the only structure I really want to be aware of in a first draft is the overall three act thing, and I can pretty much intuit that. As for whether I’m hitting the end of my set up on page 10*, I can “fix it in post” with Final Draft if I decide to care.
Scrivener’s true beauty lies in its purposeful limitations.
Scrivener Forum: If you think the script binding stuff is limiting, let me introduce you to Syd Field, Robert McKee, the Save The Cat guy, and the producers who think those fellows have the secret formula – they are legion.
From what I’ve seen these guys are a little industry that’s creepy and exploitive as fuck. It’s all fine and good if you’re writing TV adventure movies for Turkish 12-year-olds. But that bastardized, pseudo Joseph Campbell, write by the numbers crap is the opposite of writing creatively - and soooo eighties.
Every artist to their own style. (I don’t think we’re in any peril of seeing page breaks soon, so no sense wasting pixels on that debate.)
“Structure” seems to bug a lot of writers. In other kinds of art, they call structure “form.” You just learn the form and create within them, or destroy them, depending on what kind of a piece you’re doing. In some regards, a form is liberating, because it limits your choices.
I’ll agree with Field, McKee and a few others, but Blake Snyder deserves better. He’s sold multiple scripts for $1 million each, one to Spielberg, he wrote a very friendly little book about Hollywood form, and he mentors people tirelessly while keeping up his writing career. Blake’s a good guy, and he’s helping people learn what it takes to make a Hollywood sale. (And no, I’m not Blake.)
Ha! Even I can’t sustain sarcasm for half that long. And my High Horse is extremely comfy and provides an excellent view of the great unwashed, thank you very much.
Popcorn: Funny, as I composed a reply trashing Save The Cat, I hesitated, thinking “what if that popcorn dude is Blake Snyder? I’d hate to be insulting. Y’know, to his face anyway.”
That said, I found Snyder’s book to be deeply depressing. Partly because he makes the scriptwriting process seem calculating, formulaic and more akin to beating the house at blackjack than actually writing. And partly because he’s kind of right. I have to admit, the author of “Blank Check” and “Stop Or My Mom Will Shoot” has done the math, and he’s applied it with great (monetary) success. I finished the book with two thoughts: 1. Snyder has codified something real and heretofore merely intuitive about screenwriting. 2. This is a job for hacks. Fucking kill me now.
Anyway, I’ve never met the guy. I’m sure his heart’s in the right place. I’m sure I’m just being cynical. But his book creeped me out.
(One more thing: I’m not endorsing this by any means, but – and I’m sure popcorn will agree – Scrivener is almost tailor-made for Blake Snyder’s system. I wish I didn’t know that.)
Cheer Up! If there ever was chance for movie scriptwriting to stop being hackwork – ie to reach an audience that is spread out but not necessarily small – it is now. Write the movie you want to write - fuck the formulas - and find a audience. You may not make enough money to buy a trophy wife and McMansion, but you can make a living for yourself and your family. Hell if we can survive - and learn and travel and drink half decent wine - in theater and public health (my far far better half is going to cure the world) - a decent movie writer can make an honest living.
See, this I don’t get. It’s form. You can approach it intuitively and kinda get it right, or you can learn the rules, and nail it. If you were a songwriter, would you be bitching and moaning about having to write verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge? If someone takes a black-and-white photo for a black-and-white photo gallery, does that make them a hack?
(IMHO, a hack is an artist who works only for the money and takes no pride in their work. No genre demands you be a hack, some genres are just more tolerant of them.)
Re your thoughts: 1. Truby really deserves credit for codifying the intuitive. His course was on every executive’s bookcase even over a decade ago. Much of Snyder’s stuff is preceded by Truby.
2. Whoo-hoo! More for me!
Hollywood conventions - from McKee’s ludicrous negation of the negation to the precise kind of paper fasteners you must use - are just a kind of metagenre. Like thrillers, comedies, horror, it has a set of expectations you must fulfil (even in a subversive way) if you’re to succeed in that genre. It’s just not the only genre and those aren’t universal rules. TV sitcom, Bollywood, arthouse have their own set of rules.
If you’re aiming outside that Hollywood genre, because you’re not submitting to Hollywood, because you’re aiming at the BBC, or you’re a Nigerian filmmaker shooting for nothing in the townships, or you’re in Bollywood, or you’re an Iowan indie with no aspirations to the mainstream, you can do good work. Just not Hollywood work. And that covers everything from paperfasteners to character arcs.
Chances are too that Hollywood will take on some of the ‘prohibited’ characteristics sooner or later, in the same way that ‘lite’ versions of couture clothes end up in mall bargain shops.
I completely agree that you stand a better chance of success in an industry if you stick with the rules it likes. But without - hopefully - getting poncey, most writers are innately questioning of any set of rules they’re given, so you have a tension, which can be creative, or it can be killing.
This little training industry is built on the idea that a subset of Hollywood is the film industry and that they have the key to its one door. They make a living convincing people that being a filmwriter means joining —and hopefully jumping to the front of - the line of wanabees trying for the brass ring of huge budgets. In a sense it’s a subset of the American Dream that everyone can be number one if they want it badly enough: the film industry equivalent of the thousands of smalltime drug dealers who live with their moms in Freakonomics.
The reality is that the film industry is huge and diverse, and mainstream Hollywood is its pinnacle only in terms of box office,. Otherwise it’s just another niche, and a boring one at that. Hollywood ≠ filmmaking any more than Theatre= Broadway musicals. And the rules that make a Hollywood blockbuster are no more applicable to the vast majority of moviemaking than Andrew Lloyd Webber’s’ aesthetic is applicable to King Lear.
to weigh in on this one (and hoping for some feedback from anyone else), much of the previous discussion tends to assume one type of writing (fiction vs non-fiction). The reality is that there are numerous writing spheres, each having different needs, particularly in terms of the importance of formatting. I have just finished a masters thesis (in Word), and having switched to a mac and scrivener, i would very much like to imagine i could do it (or the academic articles i now write) with scrivener, but here formatting isn’t something secondary to be done at the end, it is interwoven with content for me. Being able to add citations as i go along (what i previously did quickly with endnote’s word integration), allowed me to finish and not have to spend literally weeks going back and correctly putting in the appropriate citations and bibliography. So, while i could write my articles in scrivener and then switch to Word to do this, it would involve an enormouse amount of extra work, not to mention risk of forgetting where a reference came from (if it wasn’t written into my scrivener note properly), or not being able to see ‘on-the-fly’ how many references i am currently using in an article. So, in this case, it seems it would be best to use Word from the get-go for this type of writing (unless someone can explain an as-easy method of using citations with (any) bibliographic software), which would be a shame, as i love the ability to organize my thoughts into notes and sub-notes (yet see the whole if i wish), which Word’s 'document map" just doesn’t come close to.
I can see that you think formatting is secondary. Your post is actually a little difficult to wade through, for that very reason. How about a paragraph or two?
I’ve been putting in notes and citations on the fly in the book I’m writing. Admittedly, it’s not an academic book, but it hasn’t caused me much trouble or additional work. There are some other threads on this forum about using Scriv, Mellel, on BookEnds that you might find helpful.
For what it’s worth, my (limited) experience with Scrivener is that it is easier than Word for footnotes. Especially if you don’t want to gunk up your document with non-portable proprietary fields. My workflow went something like this:
Write text.
Look up references relevant to that text. Create, in a separate Scrivener document, bibliography entries of the form:
[Smith07] J. Smith, et al, Up, down, and strange, A Guide to Quantum Repair, Wiley & Sons, 2007.
Place [Smith07] in the text at the appropriate point.
Keep writing.
When done, use Edit Scrivenings to put all the references at the end. Use global replace to turn [Smith07] into the appropriate number.
Export to Word.
I haven’t used Endnote, so I don’t know exactly how I would integrate it into this flow. Still, I would think you could just paste a text citation into the [Smith07] Scrivener note.
Now, this was for a 3000 word article with a handful of references, not a thesis. Still, Scrivener’s modular handling of text should make it scalable to whatever you need.
Looking over my post, I failed to clarify one point. Each reference document should contain exactly one reference. That way you can use the corkboard to shuffle them into whatever order you want, group and regroup them, etc. You can also use duplicate on single references if you need a separate list for each chapter or something like that.
Good reference, but omits some important bits of info:
It’s not enough to use a 12-point mono-space font. It needs to be 10-pitch (10 characters per horizontal inch) as well. Courier Final Draft fits the bill.
Also, the reason that some people don’t like Courier Final Draft is that some PC printers substitute a particularly light version of Courier, instead of downloading the actual font. So the script looks anemic. That’s a printer problem that can be solved with better drivers, not a font problem.
If you don’t like Courier Final Draft, try one of the Professional Typewriter Fonts from the same type designer:
Because Scrivener has exactly as much screenwriting functionality as it has.
