# Write your screenplay in Fountain markdown

A screenplay is the blueprints for a movie, and it used to be written on a typewriter.
You bought the typewriter, and you could write a screenplay.
And not just one screenplay, but lots of them.
You could write screenplays until typewriters fell out of fashion.

The puzzling thing is, though, that as technology for writing became "better", the harder it got to write screenplays.
There are strict formatting rules in the screenplay world, implemented to help the Assistant Director (AD) on a film shoot estimate how long each scene would take to shoot.
You'd think that a computer would make this easier than the exclusively manual process required on a typewriter, and yet popular computers managed to restrict writers with expensive software that became embedded in Hollywood culture.
If you didn't have the right software, then you told that you could never be a serious screenwriter.

All that changed with open source software, though, and one of the simplest methods of writing screenplays is not to use special software at all.
The [Fountain](http://fountain.io) markdown technique requires just a plain text editor, like [Atom](https://opensource.com/article/20/12/atom), [Kate](https://opensource.com/article/20/12/kate-text-editor), [Gedit](https://opensource.com/article/20/12/gedit), or similar, and it exports to a properly formatted HTML or PDF screenplay.

## Install Fountain

Fountain doesn't require installation, because it's not software, it's a set of rules you use as you write. 
You already follow rules when writing: you capitalize the first letter of a sentence, you end each sentence with a full-stop, and so on.
When you write in Fountain, you add in a few new rules specific to screenplays.

## Slugs

In a screenplay, each scene is delimited by a line written in capital letters, starting with either `INT.` or `EXT.`, a location, a dash, and the time of day.
Conveniently, that's also the rule in Fountain, so there's nothing new to remember to create a slug.

```
EXT. CASTLE COURTYARD - DAY
```

## Action

When an actor is required to perform a specific action, a screenplay contains action text.
This is normal prose, written exactly as you'd write text in a book.
All normal rules apply, so nothing new to remember for action text.

```
A wizard wonders out of a great stone door. She approaches the centre of the courtyard and pauses. Something's caught her eye.

It's a book. She leans down and picks it up.
```

## Dialogue

Screenplays format dialogue indented from both left and right margins.
To a casual viewer, it might appear centered, but it's actually left-justified.
It's formatted this way to help actors locate their lines and to force the screenplay to take up more space for spoken dialogue, because in movies that's often what occupies much of the running time. 

In Fountain, the rule for dialogue is to write the name of the character who's speaking in capital letters.
On the next line, write the dialogue normally.

```text
WIZARD
I can sense your power. Grep? Sed? What strange terms!
```

When you export your screenplay, the dialogue gets adjusted with the appropriate formatting.

## Transitions

It's somewhat fallen out of favour now, but traditionally in screenplays there were indications of special transitions, because long ago some transitions cost a lot of money.
You still see transitions in screenplays today, but it's often meant more as a sort of punctuation mark for a group of scenes (or in the case of the classic `FADE OUT.`, the whole movie) rather than an actual instruction for the editor.

To create a transition in Fountain, prefix your text with the greater-than symbol (`>`).

```
>ANGLE ON:

The book's title page. It reads "Introduction to Linux."

>FADE OUT.
```

## More rules

You can use many other markdown conventions in your screenplays, such as asterisks to italicize and embolden and underline text.
And there are yet more rules in Fountain for edge cases and stylistic exceptions, but these 4 rules are all you need most of the time. 

The simplicity of Fountain, though, demonstrates how well designed the screenplay format was, a hundred years ago.
It had a stardard structure that made it easy for human eyes to parse, and such predictability translates well for computer parsing as well.

## Exporting and rendering

Once you're done writing, you can export your screenplay to its proper format using a rendering application.
There are [several renderers available](https://fountain.io/apps), but one of my favourites is the Atom editor.
To configure Atom to display Fountain previewsfiles in the appropriate format, and to export them to PDF when you're done, go to the **Edit** menu, select **Preferences**, and click the **Install** link in the left panel.
In the search field, type **fountain** and install the Fountain plugin released by developer `superlou`.

![Install a Fountain plugin for Atom](fountain-atom.jpg)

As it installs, you're prompted to agree to install some of its dependencies.
Once everything's installed, you can go to the **Packages** menu, select **Fountain**, and either view a preview of your screenplay or export a PDF version.

There's a `fountain-mode` for Emacs, too, which has the added convenience of performing some basic formatting as you type.

![Fountain-mode in Emacs](fountain-emacs.jpg)

Regardless of what text editor you use, you can always render your screenplay using dedicated applications.
There's a Python module called Screenplain that works well for me.
To install it, type this into a terminal:

```bash
python3 -m pip install 'screenplain[PDF]' --user
```

To render a screenplay to PDF:

```bash
screenplain --format pdf myscreenplay.fountain > script.pdf
```

![A rendered Fountain file](fountain-render.jpg)

## Screenplays with open source

Fountain is about convenience.
You can write your screenplay without the complexity of a special application.

Fountain is about budget.
You can write your screenplay without costly software.

Fountain is about flexibility.
You can write in the application you already use for writing.

And Fountain is about preservation.
You won't lose access to your work because an application goes out of style, or out of business, or because you can't afford it.

There are so many great reasons to use Fountain, but the most important one is because it helps you focus on creativity.
If you've got a movie in mind, write it in Fountain.
It's the first step to what could be a very exciting journey.