I’ve been using Fade In for my screenwriting for a while, having moved up from writing solely in Celtx.
I like Fade In’s clean, dark interface.
I like that it is WYSIWYG– you can see how it’s going to look on the page as you’re typing.
I like writing in it.
But there’s a flaw– not in the software, but my personality: The endless re-write.
Because the beginning of the screenplay is just a scroll away, I find that I’m tempted to constantly go over sections I’ve already been over.
Fade In will still be a large part of my workflow, especially the final stages of finishing a screenplay. But I’m going to try something different.
Enter Scrivener.
In an old episode of Scriptnotes, John August mentioned he was using Scrivener, which suited his workflow as it enabled him to focus on scenes and sequences, rather than get caught up in one long document.
I think I need to try that same approach– even though I’m much more like Craig Mazin, in needing to write in order, rather than flip from beginning to end, then somewhere in the middle.
I do think that writing in Scrivener, using the Fountain markup language, will force me to be more end-goal oriented. Rather than having endless rewrites of the beginning only a quick scroll away, I’ll be able to focus on each sequence, and compile them together at the end.
Then they can be ingested into Fade In, where more fine-tuning can take place.
But at least a complete draft will have been finished.
There’s just one catch.
Scrivener costs. Not much, admittedly, but I don’t even know if it’s a workflow that will suit me.
Fortunately, there’s a trial version.
There’s also a free alternative, yWriter.
I’m going to give it a go in the next few weeks and see how it goes.
I’ll also try the demo of Scrivener.
And who knows, maybe I’ll finally get that draft finished so I can move onto other projects!