Screenplays and outlining

[JamesKVL]

This is part rant, part request for advice, and part bug report. Sorry for the length.

 

I'm evaluating Storyist to see if it works for me. At the moment I'm cautiously pessimistic.

 

A little background: I've got a screenplay that I've been working on for a while. I recently engaged in a major rewrite that involved de-linearizing the timeline and radically changing the ending. I've been working on this in Apple's Pages and juggling around the timeline and trying to keep everything straight and make sure that references to events don't happen before the events appear on screen was a major pain. Large parts of it would have been made much easier in something like Storyist that lets you drag scenes around in outline view. So here I am.

 

I went to a lot of work to get the screenplay properly imported from Pages and all the elements properly tagged. So far so good. Now I'm trying to get outline and index card views to be useful. In the standard Storyist screenplay format it looks like they want to include in the outline view the scene header lines. That's all of the scene header lines and only the scene header lines. Now scene headers tell you where the scene takes place and whether it's day or night and generally nothing else. Imagine looking at the outline Storyist would show for Paranormal Activity, 95% of which takes place in the bedroom, the living room, or the hallway. This sucks as an outline. I was able to improve on this by adding text from my actual outline to the index cards. This text then shows up in the outline view as well. Of course, one blob of outline text can often cover several separate scenes. Imagine a line in the outline which reads something like Bob gives Dave a ride home and puts him to bed. This can involve a scene of Bob loading Dave into the car, one of them driving, one of them getting out of the car and a couple more locations in Dave's house (I tend to outline at a pretty high level), and every one of those scene headers is going to show up in the outline, providing no real useful information. If I wanted to move this journey to some other location in the story, I'd have to select this whole range of scenes and drag it as a group to the new location and I could end up in a real mess if I tried this with a few sequences and failed to get all the pieces of some of them when doing my selecting.

 

Again, with the text added to the index cards, it makes it pretty easy to see where a sequence begins and ends, as long as I've made sure every beginning has some text. So even without any actual grouping, that helps.

 

Let's take an aside here to introduce a bug report. My first thought was that I could use the "outline level" feature of the format styles to group all the individual scenes of an outline line together. I made a new style "scene group" that exactly matched "scene heading" except for having an outline level of one. Then I started going through the screenplay and applying this to all the scene headings which I had added index text onto. The outline view showed my scenes grouped and leveled as I had intended but it also showed additional entries inside of the body levels. Sometimes these extra outline lines would contain the text "Untitled" and sometimes they would show the text of an earlier line in the outline. This is pretty clearly a bug and suggests doing "real" outlining on screenplays is not a well-tested part of Storyist. So I gave up on the notion of multiple levels of outline entries.

 

So then another idea occurred to me. My problem wasn't so much a need for multiple levels in my outline as just to group things differently than the individual scene level and to hide the details of all the scenes that comprised what I considered to be single things, at the outline level. Really, my outlines are just synopses broken up into chunks, I just wanted a way to only show in the outline view things at the chunk level. So rather than add levels, I decided to take away the detail that I didn't need.

 

Again, I made a new style, again it was the same in all respects as the "scene heading" style. I switched all the scene headings that weren't my "outline entries" to this new style and they disappeared from the outline. So now I had an outline that had the entries that I wanted. The project items (within my script) had the useless scene slugs for their text, but the outline view had the scene slugs plus my outline descriptions, so it was serviceable.

 

Now, I told you that I had recently made a major overhaul of the screenplay. One of the results of this was that I removed a major sub-plot of the story that I just didn't have space for. All the scenes for this sub-plot had been moved to the end of the screenplay (after Fade Out) because I plan to put them into a sequel. So what I want to do in Storyist is to move these deleted scenes into their own script section within the project.

 

Which I can't find a good way to do.

 

Storyist doesn't support dragging them out of one script and into another. If I use cut and paste, the scenes come, but the new style doesn't and the text that I've so meticulously entered onto the index cards doesn't either. So I got clever. I exported my script to a .fdx file and then imported it as a new script. Okay I forget some of the exact details here, I tried exporting/importing through both .fdx and .fcf. In one of them I think the styles survived intact but the index notes were lost, in the other one, the index notes made it through but the style margins were all messed up, meaning (I think) that I will have to edit each style to set it back like it should be by comparing to a pristine screenplay's styles. Note here that only Storyist ever touched these .fdx and .fcf files; they were never processed by another program. I think this qualifies as a bug, but it could be argued against.

 

So that's where I've gotten to after many, many hours of "evaluating" Storyist.

 

What I'd like to know is, is anyone out there really taking advantage of outlining in Storyist for screenplays? How do you do it, is there something I'm missing, maybe involving scene sheets or some such? And do you just never have to move text with outline data from one file to another, or have I missed some reasonable way to do this?

 

Any advice? Tips? Tricks?

 

Thanks for listening (well, you know what I mean).

 

-- James

[thealtruismsociety]

This is part rant, part request for advice, and part bug report. Sorry for the length.

 

I'm evaluating Storyist to see if it works for me. At the moment I'm cautiously pessimistic.

 

A little background: I've got a screenplay that I've been working on for a while. I recently engaged in a major rewrite that involved de-linearizing the timeline and radically changing the ending. I've been working on this in Apple's Pages and juggling around the timeline and trying to keep everything straight and make sure that references to events don't happen before the events appear on screen was a major pain. Large parts of it would have been made much easier in something like Storyist that lets you drag scenes around in outline view. So here I am.

 

I went to a lot of work to get the screenplay properly imported from Pages and all the elements properly tagged. So far so good. Now I'm trying to get outline and index card views to be useful. In the standard Storyist screenplay format it looks like they want to include in the outline view the scene header lines. That's all of the scene header lines and only the scene header lines. Now scene headers tell you where the scene takes place and whether it's day or night and generally nothing else. Imagine looking at the outline Storyist would show for Paranormal Activity, 95% of which takes place in the bedroom, the living room, or the hallway. This sucks as an outline. I was able to improve on this by adding text from my actual outline to the index cards. This text then shows up in the outline view as well. Of course, one blob of outline text can often cover several separate scenes. Imagine a line in the outline which reads something like Bob gives Dave a ride home and puts him to bed. This can involve a scene of Bob loading Dave into the car, one of them driving, one of them getting out of the car and a couple more locations in Dave's house (I tend to outline at a pretty high level), and every one of those scene headers is going to show up in the outline, providing no real useful information. If I wanted to move this journey to some other location in the story, I'd have to select this whole range of scenes and drag it as a group to the new location and I could end up in a real mess if I tried this with a few sequences and failed to get all the pieces of some of them when doing my selecting.

 

Again, with the text added to the index cards, it makes it pretty easy to see where a sequence begins and ends, as long as I've made sure every beginning has some text. So even without any actual grouping, that helps.

 

Let's take an aside here to introduce a bug report. My first thought was that I could use the "outline level" feature of the format styles to group all the individual scenes of an outline line together. I made a new style "scene group" that exactly matched "scene heading" except for having an outline level of one. Then I started going through the screenplay and applying this to all the scene headings which I had added index text onto. The outline view showed my scenes grouped and leveled as I had intended but it also showed additional entries inside of the body levels. Sometimes these extra outline lines would contain the text "Untitled" and sometimes they would show the text of an earlier line in the outline. This is pretty clearly a bug and suggests doing "real" outlining on screenplays is not a well-tested part of Storyist. So I gave up on the notion of multiple levels of outline entries.

 

So then another idea occurred to me. My problem wasn't so much a need for multiple levels in my outline as just to group things differently than the individual scene level and to hide the details of all the scenes that comprised what I considered to be single things, at the outline level. Really, my outlines are just synopses broken up into chunks, I just wanted a way to only show in the outline view things at the chunk level. So rather than add levels, I decided to take away the detail that I didn't need.

 

Again, I made a new style, again it was the same in all respects as the "scene heading" style. I switched all the scene headings that weren't my "outline entries" to this new style and they disappeared from the outline. So now I had an outline that had the entries that I wanted. The project items (within my script) had the useless scene slugs for their text, but the outline view had the scene slugs plus my outline descriptions, so it was serviceable.

 

Now, I told you that I had recently made a major overhaul of the screenplay. One of the results of this was that I removed a major sub-plot of the story that I just didn't have space for. All the scenes for this sub-plot had been moved to the end of the screenplay (after Fade Out) because I plan to put them into a sequel. So what I want to do in Storyist is to move these deleted scenes into their own script section within the project.

 

Which I can't find a good way to do.

 

Storyist doesn't support dragging them out of one script and into another. If I use cut and paste, the scenes come, but the new style doesn't and the text that I've so meticulously entered onto the index cards doesn't either. So I got clever. I exported my script to a .fdx file and then imported it as a new script. Okay I forget some of the exact details here, I tried exporting/importing through both .fdx and .fcf. In one of them I think the styles survived intact but the index notes were lost, in the other one, the index notes made it through but the style margins were all messed up, meaning (I think) that I will have to edit each style to set it back like it should be by comparing to a pristine screenplay's styles. Note here that only Storyist ever touched these .fdx and .fcf files; they were never processed by another program. I think this qualifies as a bug, but it could be argued against.

 

So that's where I've gotten to after many, many hours of "evaluating" Storyist.

 

What I'd like to know is, is anyone out there really taking advantage of outlining in Storyist for screenplays? How do you do it, is there something I'm missing, maybe involving scene sheets or some such? And do you just never have to move text with outline data from one file to another, or have I missed some reasonable way to do this?

 

Any advice? Tips? Tricks?

 

Thanks for listening (well, you know what I mean).

 

-- James

 

Sorry Boss, only using for Novels. I'm sure someone will come to your rescue here.

[Steve]

This is part rant, part request for advice, and part bug report. Sorry for the length.

 

Hi James,

 

Thanks for the feedback and the questions. I think the thing that would help the most would be a short screencast. I'll put that together for you this morning.

 

-Steve

[marguerite]

James, welcome to the forums!

 

I am writing novels, too, but I've been using Storyist for a while (beta tester since v1.2), and I think I can suggest a few ideas that may be helpful. I'm a bit confused by the length of your post (this is not a criticism, merely an admission that I may not completely have followed all the details), but here goes.

 

1. Have you tried setting up a separate collection for your outline? I'm attaching a screen shot of my workspace so you can get an idea of what I'm suggesting. Although I have chosen to call my chapter sheets by the same names as the ones used in the manuscript, that isn't necessary: they are separate section sheets (screen sheets in the screenplay template) and you can call them whatever you like. You can also group them, although I haven't done that here.

 

2. If you set up a separate manuscript, as I have done here, and call it "Deleted Subplot" or whatever you like, you may be able simply to copy the scenes you don't want to use right now into it. I say "maybe" because Steve made an adjustment after I did this to prevent a different bug, but when I did it, I had the text of the manuscript displayed in the center window (click on the window, choose View > as Text), then moved the cursor to the beginning of the first scene I wanted to delete, clicked, moved to the last word I wanted to delete and selected the whole with shift-click, and copied. I then clicked on "Deleted Sections" and pasted: all the sections came in predefined. If that doesn't work for you, you can stash text in the Notebook for future use, although when you copy it back in you may have to restyle it.

 

If you look at the bottom of the screen shot, you'll also see that I have a collection called "Deleted Sections," where I store section sheets that contain information I may need. If you have set Storyist to create section sheets automatically (off by default in v2), you may want to undo that before creating new sections to avoid confusion.

 

3. The "Untitled" and previous links are probably because you haven't emptied the trash. If you're sure you don't need anything in the trash (you won't see the links, but they're there), empty it and see if that solves your problem. This is not a bug but a feature: Storyist is keeping the stuff around in case you need it.

 

Please don't hesitate to write again if you find this confusing or unhelpful. Storyist is a great program for writers, and I'm sure it can do most of what you want. It's jsut a question of figuring out how.

Best,

Marguerite

 

P.S. I see that Steve is already on the case. This, too, is a major benefit of Storyist!

[JamesKVL]

James, welcome to the forums!

Thanks.

 

 

I am writing novels, too, but I've been using Storyist for a while (beta tester since v1.2), and I think I can suggest a few ideas that may be helpful. I'm a bit confused by the length of your post (this is not a criticism, merely an admission that I may not completely have followed all the details), but here goes.

Yeah, that's the danger of a long post, but I wanted to do my best to forestall a lot of responses just suggesting I try things I'd already tried. Plus it was late, and how much effort is it reasonable to put into polishing a forum post.

 

 

1. Have you tried setting up a separate collection for your outline? I'm attaching a screen shot of my workspace so you can get an idea of what I'm suggesting. Although I have chosen to call my chapter sheets by the same names as the ones used in the manuscript, that isn't necessary: they are separate section sheets (screen sheets in the screenplay template) and you can call them whatever you like. You can also group them, although I haven't done that here.

This is probably more how Storyist is intended to be used than what I've been doing. I have not been using screen sheets at all. However, based on the example screenplay you get when creating a new screenplay, I don't think this will do what I want. The main problem being that there is no synchronization between the order of scene sheets (in the project window) and the order in which the scenes appear in the screenplay. While it's a good idea to have a place where you can have sheets that are not in manuscript order, that doesn't make for an outline, and what I'm trying to do is tie together an outline and a script. A split view with the outline on the left and the script on the right with "link selection in split views" turned on seems like a really powerful set up to me, but it doesn't work with the scene sheets and the script.

 

 

2. If you set up a separate manuscript, as I have done here, and call it "Deleted Subplot" or whatever you like, you may be able simply to copy the scenes you don't want to use right now into it. I say "maybe" because Steve made an adjustment after I did this to prevent a different bug, but when I did it, I had the text of the manuscript displayed in the center window (click on the window, choose View > as Text), then moved the cursor to the beginning of the first scene I wanted to delete, clicked, moved to the last word I wanted to delete and selected the whole with shift-click, and copied. I then clicked on "Deleted Sections" and pasted: all the sections came in predefined. If that doesn't work for you, you can stash text in the Notebook for future use, although when you copy it back in you may have to restyle it.

That is what I did. The text that I'd entered on the index cards (which is what made the outline more than just a list of slug lines) did not come along with the cut and paste. It was cut okay, but it didn't paste. Losing data like that is a really big no-no in software design, in my opinion.

 

 

If you look at the bottom of the screen shot, you'll also see that I have a collection called "Deleted Sections," where I store section sheets that contain information I may need. If you have set Storyist to create section sheets automatically (off by default in v2), you may want to undo that before creating new sections to avoid confusion.

Ah, you've answered one of the questions I was having. I remembered the documentation talking about scene sheets being created automatically but didn't see it happening. I hadn't noted the per-script-preferences, where you can turn this on or off (of course, even with it on I probably would not have gotten any since I've not been writing new scenes, just importing and cutting and pasting).

 

 

3. The "Untitled" and previous links are probably because you haven't emptied the trash. If you're sure you don't need anything in the trash (you won't see the links, but they're there), empty it and see if that solves your problem. This is not a bug but a feature: Storyist is keeping the stuff around in case you need it.

Nope. I've been pretty good about emptying the trash. (By the way, it would be really nice if there were a trash can icon that would tell you at a glance if the trash was empty or not.)

 

 

Please don't hesitate to write again if you find this confusing or unhelpful. Storyist is a great program for writers, and I'm sure it can do most of what you want. It's jsut a question of figuring out how.

Best,

Marguerite

 

P.S. I see that Steve is already on the case. This, too, is a major benefit of Storyist!

Thanks for the detailed response.

 

-- James

[marguerite]

It is certainly possible to set up a chronological (as defined by your screenplay) outline in Storyist, to name the steps whatever you want, and to annotate the headings. You can attach the individual screen sheets (which you would always display in outline mode to keep from having to deal with extraneous sheet information) to individual scenes by dragging the sheet into the collage of the scene. To break the link, click on the representation of the sheet in the collage and delete it (it will not delete the actual sheet).

 

The lost information problem that you encountered when you copied and pasted wasn't there when I did the same thing: it is probably an artifact of the change I mentioned. You can get around it by backing up the file before you make that kind of change.

 

Beyond that, I think I will leave it to Steve and his screencast to explain exactly how to do what you want to do. He's sure to do a better job than I can!

Best of luck,

Marguerite

[Steve]

Hi James,

 

Here is a quick screencast showing two options for outlining.

 

http://storyist.com/assets/screencasts/ForJames.mov

 

On the topic of FCF vs FDX: FCF is Final Draft's legacy format. It doesn't encode formatting information. That said, if you don't have Final Draft version 8, this option is the only option.

 

FDX is new in Final Draft 8. It supports formatting, scene notes, and color coding and Storyist can import and export these types. If you have version 8, this is the one to use.

 

On the topic of where to put deleted scenes: Marguerites option works well. As you noted, you can hierarchy in the outline by creating a style with a heading level of 1 or higher. The "Untitled" elements in the outline were probably due to blank lines of body text between your higher-level headings and your scene headings. Delete them if you don't want the paragraphs to show up in the outline and use the "space after" paragraph property instead.

 

-Steve

[Steve E]

Good screencast, Steve. And you're doing all this during NaNoWriMo. Amazing. Where do you find the time? (There's probably Basic Cable stardom in your future.)

 

Steve, I know I've mentioned this before but it would be nice to create a single Storyist Screencast Library on Storyist. com (or even here) for curious Newbies or even Advanced Members in need of a refresher.

 

Just a thought.

- Thoth.

[Steve]

Good screencast, Steve. And you're doing all this during NaNoWriMo. Amazing. Where do you find the time? (There's probably Basic Cable stardom in your future.)

 

Steve, I know I've mentioned this before but it would be nice to create a single Storyist Screencast Library on Storyist. com (or even here) for curious Newbies or even Advanced Members in need of a refresher.

 

Just a thought.

- Thoth.

 

Screencasts will live at http://storyist.com/support/howto/ when they are ready for mass consumption.

 

-Steve

[Steve E]

Screencasts will live at http://storyist.com/support/howto/ when they are ready for mass consumption.

Looking forward to it.

(Knew you wouldn't leave us hanging.)

- Thoth.