Screenwriter and author John August

Introducing Fountain

February 8, 2012 Geek Alert, News, Screenwriting Software

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

fountain file [Fountain](http://fountain.io) 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](http://fountain.io/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. ((Asked for advice on the best way an aspiring starlet could get into Hollywood, Bette Davis supposedly replied, “Take Fountain.”))

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](http://daringfireball.net/projects/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. ((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.))

Credit for the full spec goes to [Stu Maschwitz](http://prolost.com), 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, ((Indeed, we’ve folded Scrippets into Fountain, and future versions of the plugin will incorporate the revised syntax.)) 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](http://fountain.io/apps). 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](http://prolost.com/fountain) and then [check out the Fountain site](http://fountain.io).

What free gets you on Kindle

February 6, 2012 Follow Up, Snake People, The Variant

Last week, I [ran an experiment](http://johnaugust.com/2012/spelunking-the-kindle-market-contd) to see what would happen if I took one of my existing Kindle titles and made it free for three days.

[Snake People](http://www.amazon.com/Snake-People-ebook/dp/B004H8GF0U/) 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](http://www.amazon.com/The-Variant-ebook/dp/B0029ZAPRW/)), 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.

How to write Groundhog Day

February 3, 2012 Books, Film Industry, Genres

I’ve only just started reading Danny Rubin’s [How to Write Groundhog Day](http://www.howtowritegroundhogday.com/), 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](http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0072PEV6U/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=johnaugustcom-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B0072PEV6U) 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.

Two views of videogame writing

February 3, 2012 Videogames

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](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/01/game-writing/):

> 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](http://jordanmechner.com/blog/2012/01/game-writing-2/):

> 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.

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