Writing Screenplays in Fountain

I haven't completed a screenplay in over a decade.

Some of that is life...most of that is life and some of that is tools. Final Draft is great until you can't open a file you wrote in 2011 because the format moved on and your license didn't. Celtx wanted to be a cloud platform more than a screenwriting app. WriterDuet is solid but it's still software you're renting.

Every time I sat down to come back to writing, the friction of which app, which subscription, which file format was enough to make me close my MacBook.

Then I stumbled onto Fountain.

If you've never seen it, Fountain is a plain-text markup language for screenplays. It was created by John August (the screenwriter, Big Fish, Charlie's Angels, Aladdin, half of the Scriptnotes podcast) and Stu Maschwitz. Their pitch was simple: a screenplay is mostly structure, that structure is recognizable, and you shouldn't need a $250 application to express it. You should be able to type a screenplay in any text editor on any device and have it format itself.

That's the whole idea - and once I started using it, I realized it solved more problems than it advertised.

What Fountain actually looks like

Here's a Fountain document. This is not pseudocode. This is the actual file:

INT. INTELLIGENTSIA - DAY

MATT sits at a corner table. MacBook open. Coffee long since empty.

MATT
I've been working on this screenplay for ten years.

ANNA (O.S.)
The same one?

MATT
Different ones. Same problem.

If you save that as scene.fountain and open it in any Fountain-aware app, you get a properly formatted screenplay. Scene heading in caps. Character names centered. Dialogue indented. Action lines flush left. The conventions of screenplay format that took decades of typewriter and word-processor evolution to standardize, expressed in a syntax you could teach a kid in five minutes.

The rules that matter:

• A line that starts with INT. or EXT. becomes a scene heading.
• A line in ALL CAPS followed by a line of text becomes a character cue with dialogue.
• A line wrapped in (parentheses) becomes a parenthetical.
• A line ending with TO: becomes a transition.
• Anything else is action.

That's most of it. There's a title page block, there's *italics* and **bold** and _underline_ borrowed from Markdown, there's # for sections and = for synopses, but if you only learned the five rules above you could write a feature.

The full syntax lives at fountain.io/syntax and it's worth a read if you want the power-user features.

Why plain text is the right choice for long-form writing

Plain text will work in fifty years. It will work on hardware that hasn't been invented yet. It will open in cat on a server, in TextEdit on your Mac, in Notepad on a Windows machine your aunt gives you, in Vim on a Raspberry Pi.

For something you might spend a year of your life on, that matters. Screenplays survive across decades. They get rewritten, optioned, shelved, dusted off. The version of you that comes back to a draft in 2034 should not be held hostage by which app you happened to be using in 2025.

Fountain gives you the formatting structure of a screenplay in a file your great-grandkids could open in whatever the equivalent of TextEdit is by then.

Opening up the work flow

I write Fountain in two places, depending on what I'm doing.

On my MacBook, the apps that handle Fountain well are Highland 2 (John August's own app, free tier is generous), Slugline, and Fade In (Fade In supports Fountain import/export but isn't a Fountain-native editor). All three will export to PDF and FDX when it's time to share with a producer or table reader.

On AUTEUR, the e-ink device I built. Fountain rendering is built in. You write in plain text, the screenplay structure renders on the e-ink display in real time, and the file on disk is just a .fountain file you can move anywhere.

The point is that the file is the constant. The tool is whatever fits the moment. Starbucks with a laptop. Couch with an iPad. Beach with an AUTEUR. Same file, every time.

At first, I was reluctant to adopt Fountain

Plain-text seemed like it was for computer engineers, not writers. I went back and forth on this one. The thing that flipped me was reading John August writing about Fountain in the same paragraph as William Goldman's typed manuscripts. The plain-text era of screenwriting was the typewriter era. Fountain is closer to that lineage than Final Draft is. It's not an engineering format dressed up as a writer's tool. It's a writer's format that happens to also be readable by computers.

Can it even handle production formatting? Fountain explicitly doesn't do MOREs, CONTINUEDs, revision marks, locked pages, or colored pages. It's a writing format, not a production format. When you go into production, you take your finished Fountain file, export to FDX, hand it to the line producer, and they handle the production layout. Fountain is the early and middle of the process. Final Draft (or whatever) is the end.

What I wish I'd known sooner

The thing about Fountain that took me a while to internalize: the syntax is the format. You're not writing in a meta-language that gets compiled into a screenplay. The Fountain document is the screenplay. When you read it back as plain text, you can read it. When you render it, it looks like a screenplay. There's no translation layer to break.

That's the difference between Fountain and basically every other screenwriting tool. Final Draft hides your screenplay inside a binary format and shows you a rendered view. Fountain shows you your screenplay and renders the same characters into a screenplay layout when you ask. The source of truth is what you typed.

For someone like me who spent a decade getting pulled out of writing by formatting friction, that was the unlock. The tool stopped being something I had to manage. It became something that disappeared.

Where to start

If you've never tried Fountain, here's the smallest possible test:

• Open any text editor.
• Type the scene from earlier in this post.
• Save it as test.fountain.
• Download Highland 2 (free tier is fine) and open the file.

You'll see your scene formatted as a proper screenplay. That's the entire onboarding.

From there, the Fountain syntax page is the reference, and the Fountain GitHub has the parsers if you ever want to build something on top of it.

I built AUTEUR partly because I wanted Fountain on a dedicated, distraction-free, latency-free e-ink writing instrument. But you don't need AUTEUR to use Fountain. You need a text editor and twenty minutes. The whole point of the format is that it works everywhere.

If you've been bouncing off screenwriting because the tools kept getting in the way, this is the thing I wish someone had pointed me at ten years ago.

Adios!