The format
Narrator: The lighthouse had been dark for a week.
Mara: Who's there?
Joss: Only me. Put the lamp down.
Mara: You said you'd never come back here.
The wind took the door from his hand and slammed it shut.Pasted into a script's Add lines box, that becomes five lines:
- Lines one to four start with a name, so each goes to the voice called
Narrator,MaraorJoss. The name and colon aren't read aloud. - Line five has no name, so it goes to the voice chosen in the Read by list beside the box, usually the narrator.
- Each becomes its own line in the script, with its own take and, in the download, its own numbered audio file.
The rules
- One line per line of text. Each line break starts a new script line.
- Names match the cast. The name before the colon has to match a voice in the project's cast. Capitals don't matter (
MARA:andmara:both go to Mara), but spelling does. If the name matches no voice, the whole line, name and all, goes to the Read by voice, and the name would be read aloud. - Only the first colon counts. The words before a line's first colon are checked against the cast. That's why a voice's name can't contain a colon; a colon later in the line is just part of the text.
- Up to 2,000 characters a line. Longer speeches are fine, but shorter lines are easier to direct and re-take.
Set up the cast first
Add every speaking character to the project's cast before you paste, named exactly as they appear in the
script. A cast is shared by every script in the project, so you only do this once per production. If you paste
first, lines for characters who aren't in the cast yet keep their Name: in the text and go to the
Read by voice, and you'd have to fix each one by hand: take the name out of its text and pick its voice from
the list on the line.
Narration between lines
For prose with dialogue in it, such as audiobooks or audio fiction, decide how you want narration handled:
- Label it: start narration lines with
Narrator:so nothing depends on the Read by setting. - Leave it unlabelled and pick the narrator in Read by. Quicker to type; just remember to pick it before pasting.
- Split "he said" from the speech. In
"Run," she said, "now.", either the narrator reads it all, or you split it into the character's words and a narrator line. Splitting sounds more like a full-cast production.
Common mistakes
- A typo in a name (
Mra:): it matches no voice, so the line goes to the Read by voice with "Mra" still in it. Check each line's voice after pasting. - Stage directions like
Mara (whispering): Hello?: the name no longer matches, and the direction would be read aloud. Remove it and set the delivery with the voice's style instead. - Sound cues like
[door slams]on their own line: they'd be read aloud. Keep them in your own copy of the script. - Times and ratios written with a colon, such as
9:30: a colon is read as a short pause, so writenine thirty, which reads better aloud anyway. - Blank lines between paragraphs are fine to leave in; they don't make empty script lines.
Getting a script out of another tool
Most writing tools can export plain text. For a screenplay, the character cue sits above the dialogue rather than beside it, so it needs reshaping; turning a screenplay into a voiceover script shows how. For a game's dialogue spreadsheet, a formula that joins the speaker column, a colon and the line column makes a paste-ready list in seconds:
=B2 & ": " & C2After pasting
Look down the script once: every line shows the voice that will read it, and you can change any of them, move lines up and down, or edit the text. Then generate. The whole-script guide covers queuing every new line at once.