BLOG — THE WRITER COACH

In my past life as a journalist, my work frequently focused on high technology. I covered biotech, material science, gadgets, and the burgeoning field of personal computing. When it came to the latter, I wrote about everything, but preferred software to hardware. The invisible code that made liquid tools appear on my screen felt almost magical to me. Years later, when I took up screenwriting, I brought my fascination with software with me.

Nowadays I try every coder's attempt at applications that facilitate ideation, outlining, character development, and scriptwriting. Most of the time the flaws in concept, design, execution or quality leap for my throat and I uninstall before I am blooded. Occasionally it takes a few weeks or a couple of months before I hit delete. A very few times the software feels like driving a new luxury-sports car and I stick with it until something better comes along, or the developer goes out of business (that happens a lot in the digital world).

• Arc Studio Pro, a nascent Web-based screenwriting platform, has been my daily driver (man, do I hate that phrase) for the past year. Let me tell you about it.

TL;DR: Arc Studio attempts to encompass the writing process from spitballing to final draft. It falls a bit short at the beginning and doesn't really cross the finish line, but it does some remarkable things in between.

Ideation: Slightly Constrained

You brainstorm inside Arc by creating beats, the digital equivalent of index cards on a bulletin board. Unlike cork and paper, however, these beats behave more like a Kanban chart. You can organize them to heck and back with columns, colors, tags and labels, but you can't disorganize them with random placement, overlapping, visual linking as in a mind map, or really anything that represents the chaotic nature of natural ideation. Many applications suffer from this flaw, and I think the limitations it imposes are underestimated. Even a stuffy OG script processor like Final Draft now offers random placement and linking of idea cards.

Structure: Where Arc Shines

When the time is right for structure, however, Arc Studio shines. "Elements" let you create storylines within your emerging script, as well as character profiles and arcs, and locations, and link them to one another and to story beats and random notes any way you wish. All links automatically generate backlinks to the source, a big plus.

The result of your scaffolding can be seen and manipulated either in the Kanban-style beat board, or in a more document-style outline: your choice with a single click.

Drafting: Ingenious Understanding of Process

It's when you begin drafting in earnest that I feel Arc shows its greatest ingenuity and understanding of the typical screenwriter's process. The software makes it easy to write alternates for speeches, store them in a purpose-built digital basket, and swap out old ones for new ones. Formatting is easy, of course. But Arc also makes restructuring easy with a separate menu that can turn any point in the script into a beat, automatically giving it its own card on the beat board. Clever touch: on the board, the beat can have whatever title you wish, without it appearing in the script unless you mouse over the marginal beat icon. This beats outline-style scripting, in which you're forced to look at labeling that won't wind up in the finished product.

Key Features Worth Noting:

Multi-Function Left Sidebar: Does quadruple duty with lists of all drafts, table of contents, marginal comments, or notes.
Right Sidebar Toolbox: Lists your "elements" (storylines, characters, locations), project status (kind of a waste of space), or the fabulous "Stash" feature. To wit:
The Stash: A basket within fingers' reach that holds snippets not good enough to keep, but too good to throw away. This one feature is so vital that when I use software without it, I kludge my own version called "Spike."
I thought I'd use the "story arc" feature more than I have. It automatically tracks character appearances and storylines throughout your script. The idea is that with a glance, you can spot pacing issues or realize you've neglected a key character for twenty pages. The idea is sound. Maybe the problem with this relationship isn't the feature — it's me.
Branch Copy: A brilliant tool that lets you create a duplicate of any draft or beat, and work on it "on the side," without your changes affecting the main draft. This reflects a deep understanding of the screenwriter's mind, offering a playground in which novel, perhaps invasive ideas can be tried out without the anxiety of messing everything up.

The folks at Arc are obviously aiming their product at professionals and production, as it also provides tools for production drafts, collaboration and tracked changes.

Several other scriptwriting products offer versions of some of these tools. I don't know of any that offer all of them, stitch them in as seamlessly, or iterate and improve them as frequently. This is one of the (few) advantages of a Web-based application: updates happen fast and are pushed automatically.

The Downsides:

Final Polish Is an Afterthought: As with many purpose-built screenwriters, you'll wind up exporting your work to another program, Final Draft or the like, to dot i's, cross t's, and make sure that WYSIWYG. It's a shortcoming I hope Arc corrects.
Clunky AI Integration: The platform includes some relatively well-integrated AI, which you can use mainly within notes. If you appreciate the support AI can give you and are adept at constructing prompts, it's handy having it right inside the interface, although it's been buggy for me.
Web-Based Limitations: For me, this is a major downside. Arc Studio is relatively ugly, isn't well lubricated in its mechanics, and just feels coarse. The apps offered for iOS, iPad OS and Mac OS are even worse, clearly just cursory wrappers thrown around the HTML code.
Bugginess: How many times has Arc frozen, inadvertently undone, failed to cut or copy accurately, even lost some data? The answer isn't important; any value above zero is unacceptable. Yet I accept it — for now — because it's been a long time since I've used screenwriting software that's shown such promise.

Pricing:

Arc Studio has a free version, but it's basically a trial, with limited features and allowance for just two scripts. Subscriptions are $69/year for a crippled feature set (for example, no outlining features or stash); $99/year with the works, including collaboration and production features. Massive discount for students with an .edu email address.