How to Use Scriptwriting in Scrivener for Mac and Windows

While Scrivener is mainly designed for writing long-form prose projects, it also has a powerful scriptwriting feature for writing scripts and screenplays. You can enable scriptwriting for individual files or for an entire project, and you can export these files in industry-standard formats when you’re finished writing.

Scriptwriting formats

Scripts serve two purposes: they tell a story, and describe how that story is filmed, acted on a stage, or performed on an audio program. Because of this, they contain the dialogue that the characters speak, as well as actions, settings, and some indications for filming.

Scripts are formatted according to industry convention. They use 12-point Courier font with set margins for different script elements. This ensures that one page of a script is equivalent to about one minute of performance.

Scrivener’s scriptwriting mode takes this into account. The font, size, and margins for the page and the various script elements in Scrivener’s scriptwriting templates are set to match this standard.

Note: By default, Scrivener uses the Courier Prime font for scriptwriting, which has similar dimensions to the Courier Final Draft font used by Final Draft. However, because Courier Prime is bundled inside Scrivener and is not a system font, it may not be available to other applications. See the Screenplay Format document at the top of the Binder when you create a new project from a screenplay template to learn more about this font.

Scrivener’s scriptwriting mode

When working in Scrivener in scriptwriting mode, the app is designed to help you insert the different elements of a script. Script elements are:

• Scene heading
• Action
• Character
• Parenthetical
• Dialogue
• Transition
• Shot
• General text

Each of these elements is formatted in a specific way so they occupy standard positions on a page. You can see some of these in the Sample Script PDF located in the Research folder of the Screenplay template.

How to turn on scriptwriting mode

If you create a new project with any of the scriptwriting templates, its files will automatically be in scriptwriting mode. As you continue working on the project, any new files you create will also be in scriptwriting mode. For the purposes of this article, we’ll look at a project created with the Screenplay template.

Choose File > New Project, then click Scriptwriting to see the available templates.

Note: You don’t have to use a scriptwriting template to turn on scriptwriting mode. You can turn on scriptwriting for individual files in any template. To do this, select a file and choose Format > Scriptwriting > Script Mode. This is practical if you’ve written a story or a novel and want to start drafting a screenplay in the same project. You can create new files below the existing prose files, toggle scriptwriting mode, and start writing.

Since formatting is so important when writing a screenplay, Scrivener helps you by making it easy to choose the appropriate element as you write. The footer of the Scrivener Editor shows you the currently active element and which elements you can switch to if you press Tab or Return.

In the screenshot above, I’ve just pressed Return after a line of dialogue. Scrivener knows which elements are likely to follow other elements when you press Return. The footer tells me that the active element is Action, and that I can press Tab to switch to Character. But I may not want to use Action or Character; the footer shows that if I press Enter (or Return), I can select an element. Pressing Return shows this pop-up menu.

This menu displays where your cursor is, and pressing the down- and up-arrow keys moves through that menu. As you select different elements in the menu, Scrivener moves the cursor to the appropriate position on the line for the formatting of each element.

You can also access a similar menu by clicking that section of the footer, or by pressing Command-Shift-Y on Mac or Ctrl+\ on Windows. When you invoke the menu by one of these methods, you see single-key shortcuts to the right of each action, and you can click these to select an element.

As you get used to this type of formatting, you will find that Scrivener often switches to the appropriate formatting when you press Return; if not, you can press Tab to cycle through the various elements; or you can use the keyboard shortcut to display the menu and then press a key to select an element. Since there are only nine elements, you’ll find that you develop muscle memory and can quickly switch to the element you want as you write.

You’ll also notice as you write that Scrivener will offer to auto-complete some elements, such as character names you’ve already used, transitions, shots, etc.

Script settings

If you choose Format > Scriptwriting > Script Settings, Scrivener displays a dialog showing settings that allow you to adjust the display and formatting of each script element. Scrivener’s general settings (Mac) or options (Windows) still apply to most aspects of the app’s behavior and display.

Select an element in the sidebar, then choose font and paragraph settings if you want to change the defaults. You can also tell Scrivener which elements to switch to after pressing Tab and Return, and set some auto-complete settings for some elements.

Page count

Since page count generally translates into minutes of a script, you can use Page View to get an estimate of the length of your script. Choose File > Page Setup and select the appropriate page format, generally US Letter or A4. You can then choose View > Text Editing > Show Page View.

With Scrivenings view, you can view your entire script, or multiple files, as if they are one. But the default separator that displays in that view, showing where files change, adds a line to the text.

To remedy this, choose Scrivener > Settings (Mac) or File > Options (Windows), then click the Appearance tab, then click Scrivenings in the sidebar. In the Scrivenings Separator section, under Scriptwriting, choose Corners. This means that when you are in Scrivenings view, no extra space is added between files. If you have a lot of scenes, the standard divider could add several pages to a full-length screenplay. You can see these corners in the screenshot below.

Exporting your script

When you’ve finished writing your screenplay, you’ll have to export or compile it in a format that others can use. This is generally Final Draft, which is the most commonly used scriptwriting software. In How to Compile Your Scrivener Project for Print, PDF, or Microsoft Word, we look at the basics of compiling a Scrivener project.

Depending on the template you chose, you may see different formats in the Compile sidebar. In this example, there is only one, Script or Screenplay, and the Compile For menu automatically selects the Final Draft .fdx format.

You can, of course, choose another format in that menu. For example, if you’re exporting a script for someone to read who doesn’t have Final Draft, choose PDF or Microsoft Word.

Since font, size, line spacing, and margins are preset in scriptwriting templates, you don’t need to apply section layouts, though if you’re not exporting your script for Final Draft, you have the option to do so. (See Using Section Layouts to Compile Your Scrivener Project).

Click Compile and Scrivener pieces together all your scenes into a file in the selected format.

Scriptwriting offers a few more features, such as importing script files, working with Fountain (a simple markup language, based loosely on Markdown, designed for screenwriters who prefer to work in a plain-text environment), and more. See chapter 19 of the Scrivener manual.