Turn Your Script into Noise!

Many of you, the huddled, frenzied masses, may be familiar with the computer program Final Draft. Final Draft is usually considered the industry standard for screenwriting. It's a great program. Recently though, deep in the bowels of Final Draft, I discovered something truly amazing.

Final Draft has a function called "text to speech," which allows you to assign voices to the various characters in your script, and have the program read to you. This simulated table read promised the sort of techno-kitsch I simply cannot resist. I hurriedly assigned some "actors" to the parts in my script. Bruce. Karen. Pipe Organ. I clicked play.

Nothing could have prepared me for this: the total de-familiarization of language. You know the sublime nonsense achievable when you repeat the same familiar word 10 or 20 times out loud, and the word begins to lose contact with its meaning? What if every word in your script could be this way? You would no longer have a script, but an alien document. And that is exactly what I had.

I listened to the entire thing, virtual-cover to virtual-cover. I laughed. I cried. The absurdly confident robot voices filled the room.

Of course, you don't really need a program for a table read. You just need some friends, or very confused strangers, or a recent crush who will indulge you—for the duration of their infatuation—with absolutely anything. What Final Draft provides is much more valuable. The question becomes not "How will my script sound with performances?" but rather, "How will my script sound in a performance vacuum, spoken aloud somehow without any inflection or humanity?"

I'm not sure what this will tell you about your script, but it will give you a new feeling for your voice and language. You will discover what belongs, truly, to your language, and what belongs to interpretation, extrapolation, and context.

Tip for novelists: Simply copy and paste a block of prose into Final Draft as a monologue, and you too can wallow in the beautiful sing-song of Final Draft's robot players.

– Max

Photo by Flickr user Katy.Tresedder