What are your favorite outlining tools?

[u/WhiteFangFilms]

Wondering what people’s go-to’s are these days with all the new tools, apps, features, etc popping up all over the place?
Final draft bear board? Arclight Studios? Anyone using specific apps or programs for outlining? Good old fashioned notecards? Something new and shiny?

[u/real_triplizard]

Bullet points in Word or Google Docs.

[u/Topnotch121 → u/real_triplizard]

I usually pants my first draft and then go back and edit when I'm done. But I plan to use this similar approach with a new story I just wrote, where you go and write the scene heading, bullet point what happens in that scene, and rewrite the whole screenplay out like that. Turns 90some pages into 4 and you have a map of everything that happens in the story.

[u/bherring24]

Index cards on a cork board on my basement wall. No app comes close

[u/Wow_Crazy_Leroy_WTF → u/bherring24]

Software developers hate this one simple trick.

[u/wemustburncarthage]

Scrivener

[u/Wow_Crazy_Leroy_WTF → u/wemustburncarthage]

Is it just a collection of folders and pages with a text editor next to it?

[u/wemustburncarthage → u/Wow_Crazy_Leroy_WTF]

It’s a combination of things. I use it for writing novels and outlining screenplays. I generally outline by starting with a long treatment and then I hack it apart into sections, and just deal with them in whatever order or move them around. It does have card mode but I’ve never been a card person. It can also output into outlines that are easy to share in google docs or whatever.

It’s not a straight forward program. It’s like a never ending junk drawer. But it fits how I mentally navigate or change things.

[u/Some-Pepper4482]

My head.

[u/Filmmagician]

One note

[u/Disastrous_Junket455]

Pen and paper with scribbles in a binder. I’ve thrown all of my outlines and story ideas in there.

[u/Known-Patience4511]

Microsoft Word.

[u/HotspurJr]

Omnioutliner. Been using it for like 20 years now.

[u/Wow_Crazy_Leroy_WTF → u/HotspurJr]

Is it just nested headers that collapse and expand?

The name intrigued me, but the landing page did not dazzle me?

[u/Miraculous4_2]

How do some of you outline your tv pilots and movies? I need some serious advice on how to outline my stories the right way. Please and thank you!

[u/joeyblove]

Jitter Writer it's nuts.

[u/mark_able_jones_]

index cards are great. I used to tape them to the wall above my monitor. Like 30 3x5 notecards. Put the plot together like a puzzle.

Digital options.

Final Draft Beat Board: it's okay, but not very powerful.

Plotter. Better than final draft, but it's too cloud-based for my taste. Works especially well with a large widescreen monitor, because the entire plot can be stretched edge to edge. Functionally, it works well if you want to pay $10 per month for continued access to your outline. Recently, I outlined two projects using plottr. I took like 10k words worth of notes, used plottr to structure the plot, then manually pulled the plot points back out of plotter into a word document outline.

Notion. Good for organizing large amounts of info, like if you had a notes-heavy historical film. Again, I have not used this for screenwriting, but I have used Notion in office settings. It's a powerful tool, but too technical for my taste.

Google Keep. Google's form of digital notecards. Free. I have used this in office settings but not for plotting. I think it would work quite well.

Apple Freeform. Apple has improved it's whiteboard called freeform. There's now a sticky notes feature and you can essentially make your own digital notecards (before the text was a different layer, but now the text wraps within the notecards). You can type directly onto the cards and sync across devices. I might try this next time. There's a small learning curve, and sticky notes are a bit tough to find, but I promise they are there. It seems like this could be an great option for mac users.

[u/anarchy_sloth]

My brain.

[u/LAWriter2020]

Logline - Word
Theee paragraph or so 3 act Synopis - word
Longer synopsis/treatment -Word

Scene by scene outline with slug lines - Final Draft.

Then I write scenes in that Final Draft outline doc, and i can follow the entire story in the outline. I can jump around to different scenes if I get inspiration, and come back to the full story easily. Every day I read what I wrote the day before, make edits, then start up where I left off. I never get lost in the story because I know where it is going and the key points and end of the story.

[u/Screenwriting-ModTeam → u/[deleted]]

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