So the ultimate mobile screenwriting solution may be, for the time being, your favorite among the many lovely Dropbox-based plaintext writing apps out there.

Are other screenwriters as dissatisfied with their workflow as I am? Is there a part of your workflow where you’d give up WYSIWYG and accurate pagination to just get words on the page in a way that freed you from a specific device, and specific software? Or do we expect that Final Draft, Inc.’s promised-but-delayed iPad app will be what we’ve been wanting? Or that one or more of the existing iPad apps will become awesome?

Screenwriting is challenging enough that I often catch myself “fiddling” (in the Merlin Mann definition: spending more time putzing with the tools than doing the work) with ways of making it more visual and intuitive. And now here I am fiddling with a way of making it less visual for the sake of more portability.

Maybe I should just shut up and write. Which is exactly what I did after I got this all figured out. I put all the toys away and wrote a six-page treatment for a feature I want to make.

I wrote it in Markdown. And yesterday, as I was out walking my dog, I got an idea for a small tweak. I sat down on a bench in the sun, pulled out my phone, and made the adjustment while it was still fresh in my mind.

Awesome.

Update

on 2011-08-09 22:59 by Stu

Apparently I’m either not crazy, or not the only crazy person out there. Turns out others have experimented with tools to enable plaintext screenwriting.

Via @dansturm: screenbundle for TextMate

Via @erichocean: eleanor

Via @vilcans: screenplain

All seem to behave like Final Draft in interpreting plain text into a screenplay format. Which is nice, but it’s a one-way street. I’m thinking there might be a place for a plaintext screenplay format with markdown-like syntax, and a WYSIWYG desktop app that works with that format as easily as FDX.

The syntax would be necessary for special cases, such as forcing a Scene Heading element even when the first characters are not INT or EXT, simultaneous dialog, title pages, and centered text for the all-important “THE END.” Markdown syntax would be used for **bold** and *italics,* but being screenwriters, we need _underlining_ too, and the ability to _**combine**_ them.

This way we could have the niceties of a dedicated desktop WYSIWYG app combined with the edit-anywhere flexibility of plaintext.

Update

on 2012-01-28 05:34 by Stu

And now I really am crazy, because you can view the Screenplay Markdown sytnax proposal here.

Update

on 2011-08-12 18:14 by Stu

And now there’s a video.