Let me just say this: I love Trelby. But I’ve outgrown it. If you’re getting started with screenwriting, start with Trelby. It hasn’t updated in years, but it’s FOSS and will teach you the essentials.

Fade In sounded like it was going to do more of what I wanted and it’s a fraction of the price of Final Draft, which is otherwise the industry standard. I won’t say much more about Final Draft other than I tried the demo and found it to be busy software that was impossible to work in.

Fade In is essentially perfect for me, though, minimizing distractions while maximizing functionality. It is, in effect, a lot like WordPad in a way, which is still the lynchpin of my workflow. If you take nothing else away from this review, it should be that Fade In lets you write with next to no hassle.

The good

Fade In is closely integrated with Fountain format, which is essentially a variant of Markdown designed for screenwriting, making it very easy to pick up even if you don’t already know Markdown, and making a seamless transition if you do. If you find yourself too bothered by messing around in menus, you can always right click a block of text or any blocks you have highlighted and brute force it in Fountain.

The page takes up most of the screen and all your formatting stuff is on the right, putting the focus on what you’re writing. There are a lot of small buttons to cram everything in there, which may cause issues for people with vision problems, but the best word to describe it would probably be "modest." It’s very smart about prioritizing the things you’ll need most.

Fade In can import a plethora of outside formats including Trelby’s and even older versions of at least one major proprietary format. Naturally, it can also import Fountain format. That’s probably going to be your best friend when trying to convert stuff.

The overall experience of working in it is smooth and other than some nitpicks, it’s a fantastic way to write on something new or something that it works with that you’ve converted.

Despite what’s coming next, it has my recommendation.

The bad

There are a handful of downloadable templates and some of them have problems. Fade In is REALLY good at screenplays, but kind of trips over itself for novels and simply doesn’t have correct formatting for stage plays. Which is a shame, because stage plays really shouldn’t be quite so hard. I can understand certain things being a little fiddly, but the real kicker is that the "SETTING:" and "AT RISE:" are lumped under "Notations" as if that stuff wasn’t important rather than an essential building block of the script. There are specific positions that those bits of text go in and worse yet, the "Notations" are italicized, which is fixable if you modify the style, but it’s the kind of lack of care that feels like a punch straight to the solar plexus when you know what it’s supposed to look like. This isn’t simple ignorance; it’s the kind of crap that feels unfinished like someone left that marker to make it stand out so they’d remember to come back to it later. I would rather not have had it at all if it needed more time in the oven than have it be so flagrantly wrong. That’s disrespectful to anyone who paid money to use your product. Worse yet, it’s misleading to anyone just starting out and makes their script look bad. Anyone reviewing a script is going to quickly throw the script out and move on. They have dozens to work through; industry standard is to toss anything that doesn’t conform to the format. For a paid professional product, that’s inexcusable. The best recommendation I have for screenplays is to use LibreOffice and set up the appropriate custom tabs. LibreOffice is free and it’s going to get you where you need to go much more easily for stage plays.

As for novels, there are bits that simply don’t work. Specifically Fountain format for Chapter End is broken and that can make it a tedious mess to fix after you import. And every time you use one, it’s going to suggest "Int.," "Ext.," and "Int./Ext." to start a chapter title. This is a petty annoyance, but when you use quite as many dinkuses as I do, it adds up. Also annoying is its inability to accept tabs, with the instruction that you should use a pound/hash (#) instead of any sort of asterisks or bullets, which is yet more manual fiddling you’ll have to do if you were writing in something else.

Which is the biggest rub. It’s great to start things in, but trying to convert anything that isn’t a major competitor is, politely, a chore. Getting a novel in there requires extensive manual cleanup and probably multiple attempts, which positively sucks, because Fade In lulls you into a false sense of security by letting you import RTF only to treat the entire thing like unformatted text. That kind of defeats the whole purpose of RTF. You might think you’ll get smart and do HTML instead, but it does the same thing with that. The answer is to either do RTF and know the format well enough to brute force it into Fountain format, or to do it as HTML and brute force it into Fountain format, and either way go through everything you’ve written so far making sure something didn’t get screwed up. If you have RTF and want to have an easier time brute forcing it without knowing RTF, you might have better luck with my own RTF2BBCode to get it into a friendlier format to do your replacements. And ANY time you import, it’s going to default to whatever the default template is, Screenplay by default, so you’re going to have to apply the template you actually want probably multiple times, which has to be done by navigating menus.

You’re also going to have problems if you’re used to Trelby’s Notes text for your screenplays, because rather than putting it where you can see it, it hides it behind a little sticky note icon that attaches itself to other text. I was strongly invested in Notes in Trelby to handle game logic, specifically branching conditions, which now kind of have to all be converted to Actions. Trelby even put it all in a nice box with rounded corners in the script PDF. It makes it very inconvenient to work around.

That said, most of this all isn’t that bad and the parts that are, you can learn from my experience.

The experience

Booting up will actually ask you what software you’re coming from so it can make adjustments to help make itself feel more familiar and that is a Godsend. Telling it to act more like Trelby didn’t look like it actually did a whole lot over telling to to be more like itself, so the changes are probably subtle, but it did FEEL better after I reset it and had it do that because I couldn’t find the option in the menus, so it must have done SOMETHING. Or maybe it’s the placebo effect; who knows?

For screenplays, it was everything I was hoping for outside of my specific gripes about the Notes. In particular, because I’m not doing spec scripts so much as scripts for myself and people I might lasso in, I wanted to borrow more heavily from stage plays to use underlining for emphasis, which is technically a no-no, since you’re considered the writer, not the director. I’m both, so I get to make that executive decision. In final drafts, there are other standards to denote emphasis, such as putting an apostrophe in front of the word, but it’s harder for me to read, so software that lets me break convention a bit suits me well. Underlines are actually starting to maybe creep their way into acceptance anyway.

I want to emphasize that I am in a position where I’m able to break the rules because I’m the one making everything. If I had any intention of hiring professional voice actors or selling a script, it would be much more important that I follow industry conventions, but in absence of that, doing what makes sense to my own brain or is easy enough for friends and family to read is going to be much more important. Not all of the tools in this software are good practice and some of them would get a script thrown out. This is software for someone who understands what they’re doing. If you’re just starting out, I really have to point you back to Trelby, because Trelby’s more limited feature set is going to stop you from making mistakes and it has the attractive price point of "free." You can worry about coming back to Fade In once Trelby is something you yourself have outgrown.

Oh, look! Weeds! (Mini-Rant)

Script format is stubbornly unchanging, and chained all the way back to the typewriter. Underlining being one of the few things you could do means it’s becoming the newest thing they’re begrudgingly letting you do. It’s been a standard in theater forever. The difference is that in theater, the writer is considered the definitive authority on how the work should be performed. Stage play scripts are essentially the opposite of screenplay scripts. The dialogue is wide and the action is narrow in a stage play even though both formats roughly translate to about a minute per page. The reason for that has a bit to do with the cadence of a stage play and how lines are delivered, but there are various other factors and, ideally, between the two formats, you want to have a pretty good balance of both, so it sort of evens out. Stage plays have to concern themselves much more with things like the physical environment, where everyone starts in the scene, and how they move around the stage, with the stage being a fixed space split into 9 sections and center stage being the center of attention. There’s more of an expectation that because many companies will be performing the work, it’s prescriptive, and things like emphasis are just part of that. The playwright is an auteur delivering what should be treated as a consistent product, and the playwright is not going to be hanging around every single production to tell them how to do it, in many cases unless they’re haunting the place. It’s thus the playwright’s job to deliver that vision in the text and the performers to conform to it for their audience. The hope is that their audience will be familiar with that work’s reputation and come to see it for themselves. There is no space for ad-libbing because the script itself is what needs to be as close to perfect as possible so the players can focus on delivering it day after day through practice and rehearsal.

In contrast, screenplays often have many revisions, including multiple writers, and are a more collaborative effort. The writer on a screenplay is much more of an "ideas guy" and ideas are the cheapest thing in the industry.

If you’re a TV show, you have a writers room and people spitball and collaborate and come up with their own ideas in relation to the series Bible, which is what keeps things consistent. The show will have a creator, but unless you’re bringing a pedigree, that’s accepting that you’re releasing control to other people. There will be dedicated teams to set design, costume design, hair and makeup, sound design, etc. Writers will take bits of an actor’s performance and use it in later appearances; actors become the definitive source of who the character is across many writers because they’re the only person who has to touch the character all the time. There is back and forth. TV scripts do have room for things like emphasis because of the rapid pace of TV filming and in some respects, TV is sort of a hybrid between stage and the silver screen because the money falls somewhere between the stage and silver screen. The rapid pace is, quite frankly, something that movie actors often cannot keep up with. It is its own world and stage players are likely to make an easier transition. But that grueling schedule also means that it’s highly unusual for any one writer to do all or even most of it. Scripts will get rejected, or edited into a Ship of Theseus. The show’s creator is probably not going to be in the weeds with all that, instead focused on the big stuff like any overarching season narrative or worldbuilding. You are not going to be the auteur of the show. No one is.

For a movie, the director is the key person controlling the performances and thus the feel of the movie, and actors are expected to be able to leave their mark because it’s their reputation on the line. A spec script has absolutely no emphasis in the dialogue, no transitions, no shots specified, no nothing to tell anyone downstream how to do their job, because a spec script is there to get someone else’s imagination going. Once the actors are in place, they’ll start with a table read with absolutely no emotion whatsoever just to see what everything is and then build out their performance from the context. Putting emphasis in there for them is like standing over a chef’s shoulder telling them how to cook your eggs. No one likes a backseat driver. Again, unless you have a pedigree, and very few people do, you’re not going to be calling the shots. They’ll make you rewrite your own work or they’ll give it to someone else who will. If you stay involved in the production, you’ll move onto a more finalized script where transitions and emphasis and such will be added in and it will be your job to implement those things as part of a more collaborative effort, and part of that collaboration will involve your own suggestions. There’s no requirement you actually stay with the production. Once you sell your script, you might even make a deliberate decision to cash out. If you do want to stay on, being pleasant to work with and timely will help greatly.

This all may sound depressing, but breaking into a creative industry is tough and nobody wants to deal with an egotist who hasn’t earned it. Again, you are collaborating with dozens or hundreds of people. That’s how collaboration works. These are people you have to face. Unlike a play, everyone involved in the production is going to be involved once. The script isn’t going to be reused by countless crews for centuries after you’re gone, to be performed on a modest budget night after night on one small stage. It’s going to be performed to exacting standards under highly technical conditions on multiple soundstages and real-world locations to cobble together as close to a perfect product as possible in hopes it makes back its massive budget very quickly, or so the series keeps making ad and merch money. People go to the cinema for a very different sort of spectacle than they go to the theater for. Everyone understands movie magic means what they’re seeing isn’t real. Theater magic is the magic of what is real. Plays need instructions on how to make it happen. Movies and TV have many people involved in making the magic happen, starting with the writer and ending in the cutting room. They are two fundamentally different standards.

In either case, getting eyes on your script is going to mean running it past someone who either has money or works for someone who does. And chances are you’re far from the only person hitting up that specific checkbook, so filtering out all the junk needs to be done quickly. You might have the next genre-defining runaway success, but that’s you and a million other people, so the basic agreement that everyone starts with is standards. If your work has formatting errors, in the bin it goes. Why? Because the next one isn’t going to have those formatting errors. Or the next dozen. You need to put in the effort of respecting the format someone expects to see if you want them to respect the writing. Mailing a script is a job interview; you wouldn’t show up to a job interview in nothing but dirty underwear and expect to get hired. You dress for the job. Having everything correctly formatted is dressing your script for the job.

If you’re wondering how a typewriter underlined, that’s easy. Backspace didn’t originally delete things; it let you combine characters. The original typewriter format didn’t have several keys on it at all. The number "1" was just typed as lowercase "L" (l), "0" was O, and typing an exclamation point was a matter of hitting ., Backspace, and ' to build it out of parts. Underlining was just a matter of backspacing all the way to the beginning of the word and typing underscores (_) until you got back to the end.

Back to the experience

At any rate, while italics and boldface are still considered improper formatting by industry standards, italics at least are useful for foreign words as per standard prose, which otherwise don’t quite have a scriptwriting standard. Some recommend offsetting them with square brackets ([]), but the important thing is it’s offset. I don’t really like square brackets; italics are more natural. As far as scriptwriting goes, they’re more or less as correct as anything else. Underlining is useful for emphasis and the industry might even let you get away with it, maybe, as long as it’s absolutely necessary and you already have them super hooked and it’s maybe 5-10 pages in so they know everything is right otherwise. Ultimately, the most essential thing is that it’s a good read. You just have to understand what’s a good read. Fade In lets you do this stuff because it assumes you’re already a pro and do know what’s a good read. It also lets you do this stuff because it doesn’t strictly limit itself to scripts. Which is to say if absolutely nothing else, it’s useful for the novel plugin.

For novels, it’s overall not bad to work in, but I got off to a rocky start. See, when I write novels, I write them in a format that’s a lot more like Fountain, so I had extensive cleanup to deal with to remove a lot of the extra line breaks as I was fighting with it in raw RTF format trying to make raw text out of it during my attempt to fight things into place. After I finally fought something new I’m working on into proper format, I ended up having trouble reading it and feeling too much like it was in a format for a teacher to mark up, because never in my life have I written double-spaced for any other reason. My brain simply wouldn’t process it properly and I even went and found every novel I could easily grab to find the one that would prove it was wrong before ultimately giving up and going to bed.

The thing is, the next morning I woke up, gave it another look, and everything clicked. Yes, it’s double-spaced so someone can mark it up: your editor. All the weirdness with how it insists you use a pound instead of asterisks is because you’re not writing a novel to publish; you’re writing one for review. It takes all the distractions out and makes it clear what you’re doing as part of the professional process. And the page lengths listed for all the chapters finally made sense because it tracks how things are going to look on pages that are not 8½×11" pages. And somehow looking at it I could actually parse everything. Taking what I learned, I used my knowledge to more easily convert First Fantasy, a largely completed novel, into Fountain format and had a much easier time massaging it into a Fade In manuscript.

From that point, I have had a blast working with both stories. Yes, there are petty annoyances, but the way it’s helped me understand the way it would be in print more than makes up for it. The white space and the way things fall on the pages have helped immensely in the process of breaking up large blocks of text and editing down sections that ramble, which is always one of my biggest failings. Honestly, the smaller the text area I’m given, the better off I am when it comes to keeping things snappy. Writing a book for a paperback page has been very helpful. As someone who does my own editing, understanding it from an editor’s perspective has allowed me to more easily wear both hats at once.

Fountain isn’t bad to convert to from HTML or BBCode. Here’s a list of easy replacements:

• b and /b = **
• i and /i = *
• u and /u = _
• center = >
• /center = <
• h1… hn = .
• /h1… /hn = (blank)
• * * * = > # (currently broken for novels)

The full syntax is here. Bear in mind that because all of this is intended for print, it is not semantic. If you already know semantic HTML, you know how to handle your "strong" and "em" tags based on the above.

Get a handle on that, and the rest isn’t going to be so bad.

To sum all this up, Fade In has my recommendation, as I said before. It feels like I’ve properly graduated from Trelby into something that’s going to do everything I was hoping for. As much as I love WordPad, and LibreOffice, FadeIn is the software that’s probably going to eat their lunch. Especially LibreOffice given its place in my workflow.