Writing for visual media

Sudowrite is great at storytelling, there’s a lot of humanity built into it and that’s absolutely fantastic. I think there needs to be a way for the human writer to indicate the intended finished length of the piece. It seems to me that it’s not a case of the system being unable to comprehend the larger narrative, the system is simply trying to include all the story elements too quickly for a novel. Secondly, for me as a screenwriter, the system needs to understand the basic difference between a book and a movie. For the sake of clarity I’ll explain what I mean. In most writing the words on the page trigger the reader’s imagination directly; the intent of the writer is communicated clearly to the reader via those words and the process is complete. In contrast a screenplay is used collaboratively as a template to tell a story in a visual medium, so everything in the screenplay has to be something that can either be seen or heard. This process is more confining and less direct, things like characters thoughts have to be expressed in voice over or communicated through an actor’s reaction to what is taking place. You are still trying to tell a good, meaningful story but in it you need to use music, camera angles, scenery, and performances among many things that can spark the viewers imagination. The net result for the intended receiver of the story is an experience that is more visceral. This is because they are not being spoken to by an author, they are seeing and hearing the events of the story in front of them. I suggest that if you want the system to benefit screenwriters more effectively it needs to be able to stay within those parameters when writing for visual media. A step to consider would be reaching out to the people at Final Draft to work together with you on some sort of integration.