John August

Apps

My writing setup, 2019

Apps, Follow Up, Geek Alert, Highland, Writing Process

On Twitter, @londonsquared asked for an update on my writing setup, which I’d last written about in 2016.

Honestly, very little has changed in the past three years. I still have the same computer, desk, mouse, keyboards and headphones. I print so little that today was the first time in years that we needed to buy a new toner cartridge.

My only real piece of new hardware is the iPad Pro. While I don’t love the squared edges — it feels thicker than the old ones — I find myself using the redesigned pencil all the time. On the whole, I like it a lot.

I’m hand-writing much less than I used to. Most of that is because I’ve been writing the Arlo Finch books, and it’s so many words that I just can’t keep up with paper and pen. But I also do #writesprints a lot, using Highland 2’s built-in Sprint feature.

write sprint list

I write absolutely everything in Highland 2. I’m the main beta tester.1

For other software, I’ve started using Apple Notes in place of Evernote, and switched back to OmniFocus and Mail.

Back in 2016, I wrote:

My mail setup is a mess. The right combination of rules would probably allow me to sort out the wheat from the chaff, but I haven’t invested the energy. Plus, getting it to work properly in iOS would be a big challenge. Increasingly, the iPhone is where I’m doing email triage.

If anything, it’s worse now. I set up a rule to shunt anything with the keyword “unsubscribe” to a special folder, but that’s just hiding the problem rather than addressing it.

On the whole, I’m honestly surprised I haven’t changed more things over the past three years. I’m generally an early adopter and experimenter. But until we start using goggles instead of screens, I suspect this is going to remain my basic setup.

  1. Version 2.5, coming soon, has some pretty amazing new features in it. ↩

Why Highland 2 doesn’t automatically add CONT’D

Formatting, Fountain, Highland

In screenplays, when a character continues speaking after a line or two of action, the convention is to write (CONT’D) after their second character cue.

TOM

Sure, these radioactive cockroaches might kill us all...

He gestures to a glowing wall of swarming roaches. Like a thousand tiny pixels, they form surreal moving images.

TOM (CONT’D)

But look how pretty!

Final Draft and many other screenwriting applications will add these (CONT’D)s automatically unless you tell them no. And you should say no.

These kind of (CONT’D)s should never be left to algorithms. I’ve written about this before:1

Consider Sandra Bullock’s character in Gravity. Minutes may elapse between her spoken dialogue, but Final Draft will default to adding the (CONT’D) since no other character has spoken in the interim. You can delete the (CONT’D), but it’s a hassle, and it will come right back if you reformat text around it.

To prevent this kind of Gravity situation, Final Draft could set a threshold where it only adds (CONT’D) if fewer than X lines of scene description interrupt the dialogue. But that wouldn’t catch a more common problem like this:

MARY

Tom, stop staring at them! They’re hypnotizing you!

But it’s too late: Tom is transfixed. He starts walking towards the reactor core, completely in the roaches’ thrall.

Mary grabs him, trying to hold him back. But he’s too strong.

Finally, Mary spots Hector up in the control room. She yells, hoping he can hear her --

MARY

Hector!

Mary’s shout to Hector isn’t a continuation of her previous dialogue. It’s a new thing. Some screenwriters would choose to add the (CONT’D), while others wouldn’t.

The point is, it’s a choice the writer should be making, not the software.

Highland 2 will auto-complete if you start typing the (CONT’D), but it won’t try to put it there by itself. That’s consistent with the general philosophy of Highland and other Fountain-based apps: we will never change your actual text.

Note that these CONT’Ds are a different species than dialogue breaks at the bottom of a page. In these circumstances, there’s no authorial intent. It’s simply the screenwriting software trying to fit an appropriate amount of text on a page, and signaling to the reader that dialogue keeps going.

Highland 2 adds these (MORE)s and (CONT’D)s when you print or preview. They’re not baked-in because page breaks can change as you add or delete text.

  1. I was halfway through writing today’s post when I realized I’d blogged about CONT’D twice before. Apparently, I’ve defaulted to Tom and Mary in my examples since nearly the beginning of the blog. They’ve seen some shit. ↩

Craig Hates Dummies

Episode - 365

Go to Archive

Adaptation, Film Industry, Follow Up, Genres, Highland, News, Scriptnotes, Story and Plot, Transcribed, Travel, WGA

John and Craig are back at it with another installment of How Would This Be a Movie? They consider the story of a competitive mass Tinder date, a retirement home for ventriloquist dummies and the McDonald’s Monopoly heist.

We also revisit John’s WGA Corner for updates, follow up on the conflict within IATSE, and get a great sense of Craig’s passionate beef with ventriloquism.

Links:

Email us at ask@johnaugust.com

You can download the episode here.

UPDATE 9-4-18: The transcript of this episode can be found here.

Highland 2.1 adds a lot of new functionality

Apps, Highland

Highland 2.1 showed up on the Mac App Store this afternoon. While it’s a “point one” release, it’s actually our tenth update since Highland 2 debuted in May.

The biggest change you’ll notice in 2.1 is our reorganized Preferences window, which now features four tabs.

general preferences

In General preferences, you can choose to exclude notes, synopses and boneyards from word counts in Statistics or the status bar.

documents prefs

In Document preferences, you can opt to have scene headers underlined.

Scene heading styles are a matter of personal taste. These days, most of my scripts are using single-spaced bold headings, but there’s no one right way.

We debated whether this pane should be “Document” or “Fountain” or “Screenplay.” We ended up going with Document with the expectation that there will likely be more document-focused settings to come, including ones that apply to Markdown.

international prefs

This is big news for screenwriters working in languages other than English. By default, Highland (and other Fountain-based apps) look for certain terms that have special meaning, including INT. and EXT. for scene headings and TO: for transitions. But of course, these are only conventions in English.

With Highland 2.1, writers can add to and amend these lists of terms, including times of day and MORE/CONT’D.

backup prefs

It’s always a good idea to backup your files in multiple locations and multiple ways. For me, the combination is Dropbox plus Time Machine.

In Highland 2.1, we added the ability to regularly back up your current documents in plain text. You can choose a backup folder — I created one on Dropbox — and rest assured that no matter what, there’s always a basic text version of your document stored somewhere.

It’s not an alternative to a consistent, system-wide backup plan, but it can provide a little extra peace of mind.

Small bit of usefulness

While doing proofreading edits for the second Arlo Finch, I found myself needing to search for specific words a lot. Highland 2 uses the standard macOS Find and Replace system. It’s powerful, but it’s a little cumbersome for what I wanted. So we added Quick Find, which keeps your eyes on the screen and fingers on the keyboard.

quick find

We also added a similar Jump To… for quickly hopping around your document’s headers and markers.

Markers can also now be named. Just add a colon and a label: {{%m:label}} You’ll see more functionality with markers coming in future builds.

A few other bits of functionality were introduced in previous builds, some of which you might have missed.

{{SERIES}} inserts auto-incrementing numbers. This was really helpful for Arlo Finch, because I could write headers as

markup for SERIES directive

and have it automatically generate the chapter numbers.

screenshot of chapter in pdf

You can use {{SERIES}} for anything. For comic books, it’s a useful way to number panels.

{{TIMESTAMP}} inserts the date a document is previewed or printed (including in Fountain title pages). You can customize the formatting.

We’ve also made two more templates available in the free Highland Basic version: Stage Play and MLA Report.

And if you’re a screenwriter, you owe it to yourself to download our free 40-page booklet on Switching from Final Draft to Highland 2. It will quickly get you over any fears of leaving Final Draft, and show you some powerful techniques for getting the most out of Highland.

You can find Highland 2.1 on the Mac App Store. If you’re enjoying the app, please consider leaving us a review!