Lyrics

When a character sings, the words of the song are lyrics, set apart from the dialogue so a reader knows they are sung. In Fountain each line of a song starts with a tilde (~).

~Row the boat across the water,
~row it home before the light.

Writing them in Calmly Script

Type ~ at the start of a line and the line is lyrics, shown in italics. The tilde stays on the line, dimmed, and is not printed.

Every line of the song needs its own tilde. Enter↩ after a lyric starts a line ready for the next one, but it only stays a lyric if it starts with ~ too; anything else you type there makes it a line of action. Delete the tilde from a lyric and the line is whatever its words say, usually action.

Enter makes each line a lyric of its own, and on paper a song written that way has a blank line between its lines. To keep the lines of a verse together, end each one with Shift+Enter⇧↩ instead of Enter: the next line belongs to the same lyric, and the file gets its tilde even if you do not type it. A song opened from a file with its lines one under the other comes in the same way. Pressed twice, it ends the verse, and a blank line separates it from the next.

You can also choose it for the line you are on, with Format › More elements › Lyrics, which writes the tilde for you.

How it prints

Lyrics print in italics, in the same column as dialogue. Lines written one under the other, as in the example above, print one under the other; a blank line between two lines of the file prints as a blank line. The tilde is not printed.