I wrote my first play with Final Draft. It is an amazingly powerful package, but it is not a cheap date. When I took a graduate year in playwriting, my mentor asked me to use Book Format in MS Word for my Audio Drama. Over several years of writing since, I have created and tuned Word templates for both stage and book format. (Standard Play Script Formats). My next goal was to create a template for Google Docs. The challenge is Docs formatting is very limited. I was inspired by John Haller’s template.
Google Docs was never designed to write scripts. It is for basic documents. Recently I needed a new notebook. I am a Mac person. I had a Chromebook many years ago but found it very limiting. My how things have changed. I picked up a mid-range Chromebook for about 1/4 of what a new MacBook Air cost (Neo was not out yet.) WOW. Great battery life, nice screen and keyboard. Most of my non-email and surfing work is writing plays. MS Word app on the Chromebook forces use of OneDrive. I am a dropbox person. Thus came the goal to support Google Docs. My current play I am writing I am working exclusively in Docs. That is the only way to flush out issues with a template.
Benefit to script writing in Google Docs
One huge capability of Google Docs is the ability for multiple people to edit a script at the same time. I was working yesterday on a new script. My wife is a professional writer. We both were editing the script. I would be adding something and she could fix grammar and such. In Word she would wait until I closed the script then she could open.
