Screenwriting in Plain Text? What Is This, The Middle Ages?

A little time off after nine drafts (!) of one script and a first draft of another. Finally.

I'm a big fan of Stu Maschwitz and his Prolost blog. Lately he's been on a kick to develop a syntax similar to Markdown for writing screenplays in plain text. Which is to say, no Final Draft, no Movie Magic, no Celtx. You'd write in Notepad, or whatever text editor is handy.

The problem he's trying to solve is that the screenwriting apps for iphone and ipad mostly suck, and the ones that don't suck (particularly Celtx Script, which is great) don't play nice with Final Draft FDX format, the supposed industry standard. So he wants to write in plain text because there are lots of great text editor apps, and the resulting file would be readable on any system.

Now here's my take:  In the eleven or twelve years I've been writing, not once has anybody ever asked me for an FDX file. It's always PDF. Consequently, I don't care if my software can read or write FDX files. So I have no problem at all using Celtx Script. It's stable, it gives reasonable screen real estate for typing even in landscape mode on an iphone, and it syncs very nicely with the desktop app (which is free).

Because of my respect for Stu I tried writing in plain text for a while. It went okay, but I found myself missing having a list of my scenes I could scroll through to quickly hunt for things, although I suppose that could be solved by having a separate plain text file for each scene. And I desperately missed predictive text (character names and locations popping up automatically, so you don't have to type them out every time). When one of your characters has a name like, say, "Fleet Admiral Von Hoogenmeyer", or even maybe "Xtactycyl", predictive text is an absolute must-have. Not everybody is named "Ed".

I guess it's nice to know that I could write in a plain text editor if I needed to. Final Draft, Movie Magic, and Celtx all have import functions that can pull in plain text quite nicely if you're conscious of formatting it properly while you write. And I'd imagine it would be pretty easy for the creators of these various apps to include functionality to pull in Stu's "Markdown" standard. So if he succeeds and it takes off, everybody wins.