Dialogue

Dialogue is what a character says. It goes right under the character’s name, in a column narrower than the action and set in from both sides, so a reader tells speech from description at a glance.

NORA
Somebody has been here.

BRAM
Nobody comes here in winter.

Writing it in Calmly Script

You do not choose dialogue: Enter↩ after a character’s name starts it. Write the speech, and Enter↩ at the end of it starts the next character’s name, because a speech is usually answered. When the scene goes on with action instead, press Enter↩ again on that empty name, and the line becomes action.

A line under a character’s name that you write in brackets is a parenthetical, and the line after it is dialogue again. This scene has both:

To make an existing line dialogue, use Format › Dialogue (Ctrl+5⌘5), or TabTab and Shift+Tab⇧Tab. Unlike names and places, nothing is suggested in grey while you write dialogue.

A speech in several paragraphs

Enter↩ ends a speech. To start a new line inside it, press Shift+Enter⇧↩ (Format › Line break). In the file the lines follow one another with no blank line between them, which is what keeps them one speech (see Line breaks and indents):

BRAM
I came every day that summer.
Nobody else did.

A blank line in a Fountain file ends the speech, and whatever follows is read as action. To leave a pause inside a speech, the line in between holds two spaces, which Fountain reads as part of the speech:

NORA
I waited until the lake froze.
  
Then I stopped waiting.

Calmly Script reads such a line as part of the speech and keeps it in the file, so the speech is not cut in two. On the printed page it is the pause: a blank line inside the speech, as the example shows. You do not have to type the spaces: press Shift+Enter⇧↩ twice, and the empty line it leaves in the speech goes into the file as that line of two spaces.

How it prints

Dialogue prints under the character’s name with no blank line between them, in its own column, narrower than the action. When a speech does not fit at the foot of a page, it can be split between the two pages, marked with (MORE) and (CONT'D): see Character.