I’m happy to introduce a project we’ve been working on for quite a while.

Fountain lets you write screenplays in any text editor on any device, from computers to iPads to smartphones. It’s as simple as we could make it, which is what makes it so useful.  

Fountain files are just text. We use a straightforward syntax to indicate what’s what — character names are uppercase, transitions end in “TO:”, and so on.

On the page, Fountain feels like a screenplay. When you’re ready for formatting, helper apps do the work of adding margins and page breaks.

Screenwriters can use Fountain for writing scripts, but it’s also ideal for archiving.

Because they’re just text, Fountain files are basically future-proof. You’ll be able to open and edit them 100 years from now. You can’t say the same for .fdr, .mmsw or most of the other proprietary formats. And while .pdfs maintain formatting, they’re nearly impossible to edit.

Why Fountain

Fountain gets its name from Fountain Ave., the famous Hollywood shortcut.¹

We see Fountain as a path rather than a destination. It’s not an app. It’s not even really a file format. It’s a way of getting from a jumble of words to a screenplay.

If you’re familiar with Markdown, this is the screenwriting equivalent. That’s no coincidence; I actually exchanged my first emails with Markdown’s creator, John Gruber, way back in 2004.

I wrote:

I’d like to have a Markdown-like syntax for formatting text documents into screenplay form. This way, writers who wanted to use their favorite text editor could still generate well-formatted scripts.

Good ideas sometimes sit around for a while.

In 2008, Nima Yousefi and I built a modest implementation called Scrippets, which we released as a plug-in for WordPress and other platforms. Scrippets made it easy to insert small bits of screenplay-like material in blog posts and forums, but it was never intended for full-length screenplays. ²

Credit for the full spec goes to Stu Maschwitz, who developed a similar-but-different format called SPMD (Screenplay Markdown). Recognizing that duplicated effort is wasted effort, we’ve spent the past few months merging the standards to what it is today.

Fountain shares a lot of its syntax with Scrippets,³ but we really rethought everything in order to accommodate a range of writing situations and styles. It’s been a process of balancing philosophical consistency (no symbols) with practical concerns (centering titles). Through it all, Stu’s vision and vigilance moved this from being a good idea to an actual thing.

Fountain has benefitted from its many fathers, including me, Stu, Nima, Martin Vilcans, Brett Terpstra, Jonathan Poritsky, Clinton Torres and Ryan Nelson.

Using Fountain

You can write Fountain in any text editor on nearly any device, from an iPad to a Commodore-64. If you can get a text file out of it — even an email — you’re Fountain-ready.

In its raw state, Fountain is great for first drafts. It’s terrific for collaborating with a writing partner on Google Docs. It’s also incredibly handy to be able to write scenes anywhere.

Ultimately, screenwriters will use another app to finish formatting their scripts. Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter don’t explicitly support Fountain — yet both import the files remarkably well. (That’s why it’s great being a plain text file.) If you feel like writing in Fountain, you don’t have to wait for new apps…

…but they’re coming. Today, we’re announcing the format spec and an SDK so developers can add Fountain to their applications. The format is free and open-source. We want to see an ecosystem of apps and services that handle Fountain.

The road ahead

Back when we announced FDX Reader, I got a lot of emails asking, “When are you going to make a screenwriting app?”

Answer: Today. My hope is that we just made a thousand. Fountain turns every text editor into a screenwriting app.

To me, calls for a “Final Draft killer” are hugely misguided. Professional screenwriters will always need apps that can do the heavy lifting when it comes to production: revisions, locked pages, colored pages, etc. The big apps do this well.

But the tools should match the job. Google Docs is much better at collaboration than a dedicated screenwriting app will ever be. Power users of Vim should be able to write in their custom environment.

Fountain is meant to be generally useful. I’m excited to see how it becomes specifically useful to screenwriters in the months and years ahead.

For now, I’d invite you to read Stu Maschwitz’s introduction and then check out the Fountain site.

1. Asked for advice on the best way an aspiring starlet could get into Hollywood, Bette Davis supposedly replied, “Take Fountain.” ↩
2. Scrippets is also the secret sauce in FDX Reader, which is what got us thinking about how we’d handle things like page breaks and scene numbers. ↩
3. Indeed, we’ve folded Scrippets into Fountain, and future versions of the plugin will incorporate the revised syntax. ↩

Short URL:

After last week’s depressing reality-check, Craig and John float back to the lands of joyful possibility with a look at theme, or central dramatic argument, or whatever you choose to call that narrative glue that helps hold a story together.

Theme, like structure, is one of those screenwriting terms that entrances newcomers and annoys veterans. Or at least it annoys John.

Generally, when you’re talking about theme, you’re trying to answer the question, “What is the story really about?” Your plot might concern a spy and stolen nuclear missiles, but the intellectual/emotional heart of the story is whether any man be trusted. Or whether all good acts are selfish. Or if men and women can be friends. (Nora Ephron’s Bourne Identity.)

Also discussed: John’s love for OmniFocus + Siri, braindead tasks, and cancer — but only briefly, because this will be a happy show, god help us.

Podcast: Download | Embed

Links:

• Getting Things Done
• OmniFocus
• Craig’s endless thread on Done Deal Pro
• John’s post on Writing from Theme
• Danny Rubin’s How to Write Groundhog Day
• INTRO: Sunshine Day
• OUTRO: Victory Celebration (the Ewok Song)
• Original Ewok celebration song

You can download the episode here: AAC | mp3.

UPDATE 2-9-12: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Short URL:

Last week, I ran an experiment to see what would happen if I took one of my existing Kindle titles and made it free for three days.

Snake People got a lot of downloads. Over the three days, it “sold” 654 times. It climbed the charts, topping out at #7 on Kindle’s free short stories list.

Since returning to its normal price of 99 cents on Saturday, it sold seven more copies. It no longer shows up on any of the best-seller charts. In no way did it catch fire.

However, if you compare those seven copies to how many it would have sold in a normal week — 2.2 copies on average — the free promo seemed to at least bump the needle. There was also a fair amount of spillover to my other Kindle title (The Variant), which sold 13 copies, up from its average of five.

In another week or two, I suspect Snake People numbers will be back where they were before the promo. I’ll post another update if I’m wrong.

So, was going free worth it? Hard to say.

It certainly increased sampling, and it was gratifying to see readers tweet about it, particularly those who stumbled across it on the best-seller chart and took a chance. I strongly doubt it cost me any buyers; the people who got it free hadn’t been holding off, waiting for a sale.

In the end, I’m hesitant to even label this an experiment because the numbers are so sketchy. I’d hoped to provide a graph showing how many copies were sold based on which spot it reached on the best-seller list, but I can’t. Amazon’s sales figures are maddeningly murky. You can’t be sure how often they’re updated, so any correlation is suspect.

As Snake People was rising on the best-sellers chart, the dashboard report would only show five more copies had sold. An hour later, 100 more sales showed up. Were those additional sales the cause or effect of moving higher in the best-sellers chart? There’s no way to know.

Most writers are probably better off writing new stuff than spending a lot of time gaming the Kindle publishing platform. That said, the spillover effect from one free title to other paid titles probably merits some attention, particularly for authors with many titles available for sale. If I had 15 books for sale on Kindle, rotating free sales periods among them would be a way to increase exposure and probably bring in new paying readers.

Short URL:

I’ve only just started reading Danny Rubin’s How to Write Groundhog Day, but it’s promising enough that I think many screenwriters will want to take a look at it this weekend.

It’s available on Kindle and Nook, on sale for $9.99 today.

Rubin walks the reader through the genesis of the idea — and all the other ideas competing for his attention. The ebook includes a lot of marked-up pages from his initial notes and drafts. Most of these are readable on a traditional Kindle, but it’s one of the rare titles that actually works better on an iPad.

Groundhog Day is nearly 20 years old, but still feels very contemporary in terms of high-concept comedies, with its simple-but-clever premise and curmudgeonly fish-out-of-water protagonist. My only caution to readers is that even though we keep making variations of this movie (c.f. Click, Liar Liar, A Thousand Words), the film industry itself has changed, so descriptions of the business and process might not reflect current reality.

Short URL:

Jordan Mechner has a pair of articles looking at videogame writers. David Footman starts off with a look at how writing games is different than writing movies:

Writing for games is different from any other genre. The interactive nature of the story demands that the writer fully understand the term “Gamer Experience.” In the last five years, I’ve heard this term come up in game story discussions more and more. It’s a powerful concept, and once understood, it not only changes the way a writer approaches narrative, but the gamer experience can change depending on the genre of game you’re working on.

RPGs are the extreme example of how a game story can be unique to each player, but even on RPGs we don’t have the money or time to build more than three or four splines for the story. In a linear action adventure game, the degree of “unique experience” is much less. Still, every player wants to feel like they’ve had a unique experience. We don’t just provide an illusion of this -— we now have systems in place that make this a reality, like systemic scripts, dynamic dialogue systems, and perhaps most importantly, user-created experiences that abound in multiplayer, co-op and social games.

A good writer must be focused on creating narrative systems that tell the player’s story, not their own. It’s an important distinction.

Richard Dansky follows up with what he’s looking for when he hires a game writer:

A good game writer understands that the game isn’t about them, or their story, or their witty dialog. The rest of the team isn’t there to realize their vision, and the player isn’t there to admire their brilliance. The game writer I want to work with wants to collaborate with the team to create the best player experience possible. That means crafting a story that shows off the features that the game is built around — no setting key plot moments on the featureless Siberian tundra for a stealth game, thanks.

Game writing is an odd form. Instead of a single script at the end, you often deliver a patchwork of moments that add up to a story.

Given the tremendous overlap with screenwriting, Craig and I have argued that the WGA needs to step up its efforts to represent videogame writers.

Short URL:

I’ve written several times about my experiments with self-publishing on the Kindle, mostly concerning my short story The Variant, which briefly hit #18 on the overall bestsellers list.

Overall, I found Amazon’s ebook tools satisfactory, but the price structure was frustrating:

Amazon doesn’t distinguish between free and paid content on their Kindle bestseller list. In fact, 19 out of the top 50 books are free. There’s nothing wrong with free, but it’s a semantic and tactical mistake to include them on a “bestseller” list.

They’ve fixed that.

Free books are now listed separately, and with the introduction of the KDP Select program, self-publishers can finally price a title as free for up to five days. (Before this, only major publishers could set the price at zero.)

After reading David Kazzie’s post about his experience with KDP Select, I decided to try it out on another one of my short stories, Snake People, which had gotten nice reviews but never achieved the traction of The Variant.

To enter KDP Select, you have to promise that the title isn’t available for sale anywhere other than Amazon. Unlike The Variant, I wasn’t selling Snake People as a PDF, so there was nothing to take down.

Dropping the price is handled through a pop-up box called the Promotions Manager. The only option listed for me was “free book,” but the system seems to be designed for more-extensive campaigns. You’re allowed to be free for up to five days total, divided however you want.

Snake People went free yesterday (February 1st), and as of this writing sits at #20 on Kindle’s free short stories list, with 75 copies “sold” in the last 24 hours.

The list is everything

From our experience with Bronson Watermarker, we’ve learned that where you fall on the lists has a huge impact on sales. The higher you’re ranked, the more people see you. The more you’re seen, the more you’re purchased. Winners keep winning.

The pure ranking matters, but even more important is where the page breaks.

For Bronson, we made the front page of the Mac App Store in the “New and Notable” section. For the two weeks we were there, our sales were ten times normal. Once we fell to the second page of “New and Notable,” we quickly regressed to the mean.

I realize that writing about Snake People while the experiment is still running will inevitably corrupt the data. Some readers will click and buy it because hey, it’s free.

And that’s okay. I mostly want more data to answer correlation questions: If 75 copies lands a title at #20, how many copies is the #1 short story “selling?”

In my initial experiments with The Variant, I was able to estimate how much Stephanie Meyer was bringing in off of her Twilight books. (A lot.) I’m curious what the numbers mean in Kindle’s new free ecosystem.

So if you haven’t checked out Snake People, go get it before the promotion ends on Friday. I’ll publish a follow-up on Monday with numbers.

Short URL: