Quote:
Originally Posted by gmw
Sometimes? The secret benefit of all this "writer help" software, blogs, books and courses is guilt reduction. We writers will always find ways to procrastinate, but normal methods of procrastination - things that have nothing to do with our craft - leave us feeling dejected and guilty. Enter "writer help" in all its forms. Now we can waste as much time as we want but still feel good about it because it all - seems to be - part of honing our skills, developing our craft and expanding our tool-set.
Those phrases may sound familiar to those of you who have been on management training courses. It's the same principle: guilt-free time wasting.
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You're right, of course.
I've been playing around with screenplays (mostly short screenplays, which are almost worthless except for the fun of writing them). During this last year I've been learning, and practicing, and perfecting how to write screenplays in a text editor (Jstar using the Fountain format) and saving them to PDF or formatted text from the CLI (command line interface). Very proud achievement! And it doesn't matter that free screenplay writing software is available (KIT Scenarist is pretty amazing for free) and that it would do all this with a nice WYSIWYG front-end — it's the "challenge" that counts! Meanwhile, I think I've written about two or three short scripts all year.
To be fair, however, the only reason I started fooling around with screenplays in the first place is because I liked the way ScriptThing (later Movie Magic Screenwriter) worked. It made writing fun. I've probably written three or four hundred of these things — all pretty much a waste of time (used to post them on the screenplay newsgroups). But I've enjoyed myself, it's fun writing short stories in screenplay format.