It’s way above all the other screenwriting programs I’ve tried (yes, all of them, I looking at you Final Draft).

The included outlining feature is really really nice, as in super nice. And on top of that you can customize almost anything in the program you can dream of.

I know that the program doesn’t make the writer, but this program just takes the hassle out of writing, and really lets you consentrate on imagining stuff instead.

Yes, I am indeed very proud of myself. It is very satisfying to finally to write FADE OUT. THE END.

It has been a rather long process and it have taking me around 8 weeks to write the 49 pages that the script ended up on. But I take it as much as a learning experience and it has never been the aim to produce a full-length script in the first try.

This last week or two, I have had some serious writer’s block and I tried many different approaches to battle this. The only one that seems to be working is; writing. Just writing. Writing crap and then some more crap. It is extremely difficult, but I really found that writing is the only medicine. It actually helped me to read the crap I have written and then say “man that’s bad. I can do a lot better than that!” It might sound strange but this last day I wrote almost 10 pages in one sitting and I believe that was only possible because I have kept writing the whole time.

Another great tip I found very useful was Hemmingway’s (at least I think it was Hemmingway) way of ending your day of writing in the middle of a sentence or a scene. You do it even though you know perfectly well how it ends. That way when you sit down that the computer or typewriter the next day you know what to write. You just finish that sentence or that scene and then continue. That way you always “hit the ground running” and never have to face the dreaded Blank Page.

Oh, the story. Yes, I am getting a bit ahead of myself here. It is actually an adaptation of one of Bram Stoker‘s short stories called The Judge’s House. It is a 12-page (give or take) short story and I have taken many liberties with the source material. It started out as being very close to the original. The outline process also produced a script that was very close to Stoker’s original text, but as the writing progressed, I took more and more liberties with the story. Both because I have moved the story to present day but also because there are many fundamental differences between a short story and a screenplay. I have introduced some other characters and removed others. Overall, it, at least in my view, plays better as a screenplay this way.

I will not publish the screenplay yet, as I fell that it clearly needs at least one or two thorough rewrites before anyone else than myself will be able to understand and appreciate the story. There are many scenes that I am very proud of and a lot of the dialog that is very good, but there are most certainly also some that is very close to the worst writing I have ever produced.

The next draft of the script will also be more in the agreed length of a feature film: 90-120 pages.

I have use the great open source editor Celtx to write the script. However, even though it is great, and free, it has some bugs and missing features that are rather annoying. And in one of my attempts to battle the before mentioned writer’s block I downloaded a trial version of Movie Magic Screenwriter and was very impressed. Therefore, I promised myself that when I finished this first draft I would shell out for the full version as a reward.