Good tools help good talent go farther, and increase productivity. But a tool cannot substitute for talent.
I like to watch The New Yankee Workshop, where Norm Abram's workshop is larger than my house with seemingly every power tool ever invented.
With all those tools available, I could create some beautiful furniture. Probably. But Norm brings a lot of talent and experience, too.
When I was in high school, there were the kids whose parents could afford to buy them fancy, expensive guitars, but they really didn't play very well.
The tool doesn't make the scriptwriter. Neil Simon writes scripts with pen and paper first.
Artists should make use of available tools to further their crafts. There are a lot of scriptwriting tools (i.e., software) available, and over the next few weeks, I'll explore some of them, and look at their advantages and disadvantages.
This week, I'll start with the most simple of these: word processing software, specifically, Microsoft Word. I have used others, such as Word Perfect, and, in fact, began using these tools back in the 1980s. Coming from the typewriter age, even the early word processors seemed magical, with the ability to retain formatting, change fonts, and re-format with a few keystrokes.
Microsoft Word
With Microsoft's omnipresence in the world of computers, it's a good bet that nearly anybody you email to can open a Word document. A lot of directors, producers, and publishers want electronic copies of scripts these days, and some specifically ask for them to be in Word. It's also a lot cheaper than mailing a 100-page script. But more than the mere acceptance of this type of document is the fact that Word is really a very powerful tool.
Using the Styles options, I format my scripts quite easily. I also use multiple formats, depending on the type of script. A stage play, a screenplay, a teleplay, and a documentary each have different formatting needs. By creating styles for each of these, I can apply them so that they each come out looking professional and in the format needed.
However, it takes time and knowledge of Word's capabilities to create these styles, so that is a disadvantage. And to keep track of each character's lines, as some scripting programs can do, requires additional work in Word to set up references. But all in all, it is a perfectly adequate tool for scriptwriting.
