Screenwriter and author John August

Final Draft 8, briefly

May 11, 2009 Screenwriting Software

VIDEO: A look at Final Draft 8 from John August on Vimeo.

Final Draft 8 is largely identical to FD7, with some better chrome. If you’re happy with FD7, the addition of a fairly useful navigator and a new XML file format may or may not be enough reason to upgrade.

I’ve been using it for a week, and so far, no crashes. There are a few quirks — awkward colorization during drag-and-drop, click-lag when editing summaries — but nothing approaching the bugginess of early FD7. It feels stable and looks like a 2009 application.

I’m not endorsing Final Draft or any of its competitors; each has its strengths and weaknesses. I’ve ping-ponged between Final Draft and Screenwriter over the years, but given its interface improvements, I’ll probably stick with Final Draft for a bit. Some of that is familiarity, frankly, particularly with how it handles production drafts.

There’s a demo version available at [the company site](http://finaldraft.com), which is worth checking out.

If you’re upgrading ($79), the mechanism for checking your current license is a bit slow. If you’re buying it new, note that it’s $50 cheaper on Amazon.

Not my problem

May 10, 2009 Writing Process

Great quote from Alvin Sargent in the most recent [Written By](http://www.wga.org/writtenby/writtenby.aspx):

> Somebody told me once, “If you have a problem with a character, give the problem to the character because it’s not my problem.” It’s truly their problem and you have to watch and wait and see what they do that makes some kind of sense. Sooner or later, if they are really people, they will do something, or someone else will come and help them. But I have nothing to do with it. If you have a problem, give it to the character.

Characters are not responsible for plot; you as the writer have to decide what you’re showing, when and why. But your characters need to be responsible for the actions they take. The reader and the audience can feel when characters are doing something simply for story’s sake.

Think of yourself as the producer of a reality show. You’ve hopefully cast interesting people, who will do and say interesting things. You’ll create obstacles that will force them to react. You’ll shoot a bunch of footage and edit it to tell the story you want. But if you’re pushing your characters around, telling them exactly what you want them to do, the audience will feel the manipulation — and your characters will resent it.

States in which I’m probably married

May 6, 2009 News

maine

Nice to have you, [Maine](http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30602151/).

Writing on demand

May 5, 2009 Big Fish, Charlie, Projects, Travel

Screenwriting is generally a career in which you set your own hours and work environment. Like a novelist, the screenwriter can choose to work in fuzzy slippers from 11 p.m. until dawn, fueled by Twizzlers and Mexican Coke (the kind with real sugar). Your employers don’t particularly care about the process as long as the script arrives on time and debatably brilliant.

As screenplays tip perilously close to production, the rules suddenly change. Producers start asking for pages the same day. Directors tell you to stay close, because they’ll have some new ideas they want to add after they talk with the stunt coordinator. You find yourself sitting in an office surrounded by people frantically performing the work of making the movie you scripted.

For Big Fish, my office was a giant classroom in an abandoned high school. For Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, it was a little room at Pinewood Studios with a phone no one could operate. For Titan A.E., it was a half a cubicle at Fox. Regardless of the square footage, I was expected to write on demand. In each case, it wasn’t just small changes, but major new scenes that had to blend into the rest of what I’d written.

Novelists are never asked to do this.

This past week I’ve been in New York, working on an unannounced project that is still a long ways off from production, but facing a Very Big Meeting on Thursday. We’ve been renting studio space at a venue that couldn’t exist in Los Angeles: thirteen little rooms that alternate, hour-by-hour, between karate classes, choir rehearsals, commercial auditions and classrooms for the kids in Billy Elliot.

Number of kids in tears I’ve seen: three.

Number of adults: two.

It’s so different from my normal writing life, in which my only distractions are a snoring dog or the gardeners on Thursday. But the chaos is also kind of exhilarating, a chance to remember that writing isn’t something that only happens in hermit-mode.

Some of my favorite scenes have come out of this process. I think that’s because they tended to have very clear objectives. Meeting with Jessica Lange during her wardrobe fitting for Big Fish, I noticed that she was picking much sexier outfits than I expected. “Sandra wants to look good for her husband,” she explained. That was kind of genius, but I hadn’t given her any scenes that really supported this idea. I wrote the bathtub scene on hotel stationery and showed it to Tim Burton that same evening. That kind of insight only happens on location.

This afternoon, I walked 18 blocks to retrieve an inkjet printer, then cabbed it across town so I could print new revisions tomorrow. I’m not using any of my normal stuff — I don’t usually do “real” writing on my laptop, and hadn’t even activated Final Draft — but it’s reassuring to see that writing is the same regardless of the tools or location.

Tonight, I’m off to see West Side Story. Which is another great thing about being in New York.

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