stageplay formatting on word

It’s midsummer, and that means I start picking up random hobbies when I really shouldn’t be. After watching Life of Pi at the Segerstrom the day of my last final of the school year, I started looking into writing for the stage.

Things are not as simple as I first anticipated.

First, a short aside on screenwriting software

Back in highschool, in the midst of taking a videography class online (don’t ask, it was not good and it was during peak pandemic conditions), I had a moment when I wanted to try my hand at writing for screen. After downloading a google docs plugin that barely worked, I discovered screenwriting software… and learned that a lot of them came with a price tag too high for something I wasn’t planning on taking seriously any time soon. Final Draft is apparently the industry standard and is well over a hundred dollars - somewhat reasonable for an artist that can pay the bills, not so much for a highschooler. There are some free options out there, like Writersolo, but I quickly stumbled upon Fountain syntax and I fell in love with it.

Fountain is a markup language specifically for screenwriting, like Markdown but for writing scripts. If you’re looking to write for screen for free, look no further than Fountain syntax and Afterwriting, which will turn your work into fully formatted PDFs. I had a lot of fun writing in Fountain, and I’m glad that my files are saved in plain text, so if I want to read them in the future, I’m not locked out due to file format issues.

The problem…

Using a markup language like Fountain to create movie scripts works because there is really only one format for screenplays.

Stageplays, on the other hand, seem to be quite varied with no singular standard format. I’m no expert, but off the top of my head, some use Courier New, others don’t, some have character names centered while others have them left-aligned, some have act and scene headings center-aligned while others have them some number of inches from the left side… the list goes on. Every other guide claims to be the professional format, and at this point I’m convinced that there is no one correct format.

My first try was to check out different screenplay softwares that claimed to have stageplay templates. Some of them seemed promising - Scrivener, Writersolo, and Celtx appear to support some sort of stageplay format - but then I came to the realization that I should just make my own format and do it using styles on Word.

While scrounging the web for screenplay software, a few people said they used plain old Word with customized styles. This took me down the rabbit hole of Word styles, which can apparently do a lot more than I expected.

My format

I didn’t like the center aligned character names or Courier New font, so I based my format on the Celtx one and made slight changes. My personal format has:

• General formatting: 1 inch margin all around
  • I know some formats have the left margin at 1.5 inches to leave some space for hole punching, but I don’t plan on printing that often.
• Font: Times New Roman
  • Courier New is traditional, but I find it to be a really hard font to read, so I opted for something different.
• Act and Scene Headings: Centered and underlined
  • Nothing special here. Act headings are in all caps while scene headings aren’t.
• Stage Directions: 1 inch from the left, italicized
  • I found that stage directions are almost always in italics, and it helps to distinguish them from the dialogue. When I insert shorter stage directions within dialogue, I will italicize them as well as put them in parentheses.
• Characters: left-aligned in all caps
  • I find it harder to follow when character names are center-aligned because my eyes are jumping from the center to the left to read dialogue and back again.
• Dialogue: 0.5 inches from the left
  • I wanted some kind of separation from the character name, so I went with half an inch.
• Parentheticals: 1.5 inches from the left

Here’s an excerpt of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in my own stageplay format, as an example.

Why use Word?

Because I used Word styles, it’s easy to make changes to the entire format quickly. For instance, if I wanted all the character names to be center-aligned instead, I could make edits to the style and all of the character names would follow suit.

One more note on styles - the main thing that sold me on Word styles is the “Style for following paragraph” setting. One of my pet peeves when writing is having to stop and reach for my mouse to do formatting - I’ve found that it pulls me out of focus. This setting means that, for instance, once you finish typing dialogue and hit enter, Word will automatically change to the style for characters. Most of my styles are set up this way, and it makes writing in the format easier and with less friction. No need to think about formatting, just start writing.

I would also recommend having the styles palette docked to either the left or right side of your workspace instead of using the buttons in the ribbon menu above. Again, I wanted to do anything possible to decrease the amount of time dealing with formatting.

My only gripe with this setup is the inability to set up a secondary style for the following paragraph with tab instead. I believe Celtx is set up so that hitting enter after a character name leads to dialogue, but using tab instead would lead to a parenthetical. This is most ideal, but I don’t believe this is possible with Word styles.

If you’re looking to write for stage, I recommend using Word styles - and make your own format to your own liking. If it helps you write, then go for it. Your words are more important than the format anyway.