Incredible!

I’m a fiction writer, not a screenwriter. But I LOVE using Slugline to draft my stories. Why?

Minimalism: It’s just a white page, your text, and an optional outline on the left that you can easily remove (Ctrl-3). It’s so soothing to type on an interface like this! I love to use it in full screen mode. Also, I just love the font. It’s big and bold and basic, which makes drafting so much less intimidating for some reason.

Just Type: To access the key features (at least the ones that I use - see below), all you have to do is type a character or two or use a keyboard shortcut. This gives the user experience a quick, easy, and integrated feeling to it. The software seems to just slide out of the way and let you dive right into your writing.

Headings: it’s so easy to block out my scenes with headings and subheadings, laying out the scene beats easily.

Synopses: my favorite feature is the ability to include visually subtle synopses of each scene or scene beat right there in the text simply by typing an “=“ and then the synopsis text.
Outline: Man oh man alive! Having the outline on the left side of the page is so useful. It makes it easy to just get the high level view of your story. And you can click any item to quickly navigate there.

Notes: I don’t really use notes as much (yet), but I love that all you have to do to create a note, which appears right in the text (which I personally much prefer to Word’s or Scrivener’s comments, which happen outside the text), is type “[[“ and you’re writing a note. The note is then highlighted in yellow, which isn’t as nice when you want to put in a note while you’re writing your draft (pretty loud = pretty distracting), but it’s great for when you’re going back over and reviewing what you’ve written and you want to put in a note about something you want to change or add later (pretty loud = easy to find later). To boot, if you choose to include notes in your outline, you can quickly scan and jump to any note in your document.

Again, I don’t use Slugline for screenwriting, just for fiction writing. The one downside is that you can’t indent. But I actually don’t mind this, because when I draft I type webstyle paragraphs anyway. But I can see how this would be a deterant for other fiction writers.

Really, words cannot express the joy of using Slugline. It is truly a one-of-a-kind, amazing writing software!

G2459ht about Slugline