I like to write on the road or in isolated places, away from the internet and other distractions, and you can't take a table full of index cards with you. However, once you move into the revision stage, software becomes a necessity. Perhaps in the future touchscreens (and styli) will give us this freedom, but for now I still prefer pen and ink. And when I need to make structural changes, I can always draw arrows, boxes, circles, and whatever other diagrams I need to help myself along the way. There's only one direction to go: forward. With non-erasable ink and pages that fill up, I find writing by hand gives me more momentum to get through the first draft without doing too much editing as I'm writing. Ultimately I've found that my preffered approach to writing an outline - and first draft - is good old-fashioned pen and paper. Over the past few years I've also experimented with Movie Magic Screenwriter, Scrivener, Mori, Evernote, Storymill, Contour, Adobe Story, Celtx, OneNote - and some others I can't remember - in my search for a good outlining/structuring/writing workflow. Finally, I've never been able to get its collaboration features to work. The program seems to have an elementary-level vocabulary, as polysyllabic words often give you red squiggles, even when they're spelled correctly. You have to go into a separate viewing mode, and then you get a confusing two-across view.

Wouldn't it be nice, and make sense, to be able to do this within the program itself? While FD has an Index Card view, it just doesn't work the way my brain does.

Final Draft essentially treats your screenplay like one long manuscript, and I always find myself breaking down a script onto handwritten index cards and spreading them out on a table/floor/bulletin board. Note that it's Mac only available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, it's rated nearly 5 stars in the Mac App Store, and it only costs $30.īefore we look further at Movie Draft, let me explain my issues with Final Draft. What am I looking for? More structuring and outlining tools. I've been using it since Version 4, and it has definitely improved since then, but for a $250 program I've never felt that it has evolved as much as I'd like. It's like the Microsoft Word of screenwriting software - ubiquitous and adequate, but not something you're particularly excited about. For screenwriting, I've been a long-time Final Draft user, but I've never been a huge fan.

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