The first few things I wrote years ago were done with a regular old word processor.  It was a pain in the ass.  Every time I went to do a new draft, I’d have to manual go in and change the “continued” and all that stuff.  Setting the tabs was awful.  Making sure everything was formatted correctly caused me so much panic.

I was never able to full jump into just the creative part of screenwriting because the mechanics were always in the back of my mind.  Well, truthfully, they were front and center.

A year or so ago I got Final Draft.  It’s the industry standard for screenwriting and I totally see why.  It’s basically a word processor program specifically designed to write scripts.  I don’t have to think about anything other than the story when I use it.  When you hit Enter to go on to a next section, it asks you if you want this to start with a character, dialogue, scene header, whatever.  With a click, you can be back on track.  It becomes second nature and it makes the whole process so much quicker and easier.

Here’s something else I just found out about Final Draft.  Okay, I mentioned before that Lesley and I are going to start on a spec script to show that we can write television as well.  I Googled Modern Family scripts and found a link to a template that plugs right into Final Draft!  There are plug ins for pretty much every popular show out there.  And if you’re writing a spec script, the best idea is to do it for a popular show.  As much as I loved The Middleman, writing a script for that would make little to no sense!

Yes, the software is a little expensive, but if you’re serious about writing, I can not recommend it enough.  Here’s a link if you want more information.