The second tip was a great reminder from one of my clients who had also encountered this Final Draft glitch and shared it with me (thanks P.H.!). The Tipsġ) If you have Final Draft and you do a Find/Replace for a character name - make sure to check the dual dialogue blocks afterwards to see if it worked everywhere.Ģ) It’s always a good idea to rebuild and alphabetize your character list. For someone like me, who’s a card-carrying perfectionist, that was cringe-inducing. I found this out the hard way a while back when a director told me to make sure I had changed all of the names in the next draft. If you’re using Final Draft, and you happen to have dual dialogue (dialogue that’s written side-by-side - used primarily to indicate that two characters are speaking at the same time), for some reason the Find/Replace won’t work. During revising, you will have the opportunity to make changes to your first draft before you put the finishing touches on it during the editing and proofreading stage. The mastermind behind the script needs the phone conversation to fit the context of the situation without being lame or dragging out the scene (AKA the moment of the feature where people decide to take their bathroom break).

The step in the writing process after drafting, as you may remember, is revising. Writing a phone conversation into a script can be challenging to screenwriters. Simple right? In your screenplay editor of choice you simply execute a Find/Replace ( Edit > Find…) for the name. If you are using a screenplay program, such as Final Draft, the DIALOGUE Element is already formatted for you. A draft is a complete version of a piece of writing, but it is not the final version.

Suppose you need to change a character name in your script.

Write dialogue with final draft 8