Chapter 20 · Formats
Audio Drama and Scripted Podcast Format
An audio drama is written for the ear and made from three documents nobody hears: a numbered cue sheet for the sound designer, a casting list for whoever hires the actors, and a runtime for the commissioner who asks how long it is before anything else. Storskarvia gives you six elements to write with and builds those three from what you typed.
Starting an audio drama
In the Studio, choose Audio drama / Podcast in the Type list of the New project form. The type is settled when the project is created; Chapter 2 covers what happens next.
The editor opens with an Elements tab in the ribbon beside Home, Review and View. It holds the reading rate and the reports. The element dropdown sits on Home, where you will spend your time.
An empty document shows four greyed questions as a starting prompt, beginning Scene # and Who do we hear? They are not editable text and they vanish the moment you type.
The six elements
Every paragraph is one of six types. All six are in the dropdown on Home, and all six answer to a number key.
| Element | Key | How it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Scene / Episode | ⌘1 | Monospaced capitals with a rule under them. This is also what the outline navigator lists. |
| Narration | ⌘2 | Full width, in a blue ink that separates it from dialogue at a glance. |
| Character | ⌘3 | The cue, in bold capitals. |
| Dialogue | ⌘4 | The speech, indented under the cue. |
| SFX cue | ⌘5 | A blue tinted band, monospaced capitals, with the word SFX drawn in front of it. |
| Music cue | ⌘6 | The same in purple, labelled MUSIC. |
Do not type the cue labels. The SFX and MUSIC words on the page are drawn by the element, not stored in your text. Typing them yourself gives you "SFX SFX: door slams" on screen and doubles them again in the plain-text export.
Narration and dialogue are the two spoken elements. Every timing number below follows from that split.
Enter, Tab, and the numbers
Enter moves you to the element that usually follows. A scene heading gives you narration, and narration repeats itself. A character cue gives you dialogue, and dialogue gives you the next character cue, so a two-hander types itself without you touching the dropdown. Both cue types hand back to narration.
Pressing Enter on a line you have left empty retypes that line instead of splitting it, so walking down through the elements leaves no blank paragraphs behind.
Tab changes the element you are on rather than indenting, and it runs in a ring: scene heading to narration, narration to character, character to dialogue, dialogue to SFX cue, SFX to music, and music back to narration. ⇧Tab walks the same ring backwards.
Esc leaves the manuscript for the ribbon, since Tab will not. The full list is in Chapter 10.
The spoken rate
Open the Elements tab and set Spoken at. The choices are 120, 135, 150, 165 and 180 words per minute. It starts at 150, roughly where spoken drama sits; narration read slowly runs nearer 130.
It drives the running time in the status bar and the runtime in the reports, from one place on purpose. Change the rate and both move together.
The rate belongs to the document's owner. If an audio drama has been shared with you, the control is disabled and reads "The document owner sets the reading rate." The save route would keep the owner's value regardless, so the control refuses rather than letting you watch the status bar move and then download a report built at a different speed.
The three reports
Reports on the Elements tab opens a dialog with three buttons: Cue sheet, Casting and Runtime. It opens on the cue sheet, and Download CSV takes whichever one is on screen.
All three split the script at scene headings and number the scenes, so a scene appears as
3. THE PIER, or 3. (no heading) if you have not named it yet. Material
written before the first heading is scene 1, and a piece with no headings at all is one scene rather
than an empty report.
- Cue sheet. Every SFX and music cue, with its scene, the running time it lands on, and the cue text. Numbering runs per type across the whole piece, SFX 1 upwards and MUSIC 1 upwards, rather than restarting each scene. A designer builds one sound list and one music list, and two cues both called 3 is how one gets played in the wrong place.
- Casting. Per character: lines, words, how many scenes they are in, their first and last scene, and their speaking time. A line is one speech, which is what an actor means by the question, and the words beside it are there because forty interjections and forty speeches are not the same part. Narration is credited to NARRATOR, since somebody has to read it and it is often the largest part in the piece. Biggest part first.
- Runtime. Scene by scene: where it starts on the clock, how many spoken words it holds, how many cues, and how long it runs. The last row is the TOTAL.
Times read as 0:07, or 1:04:09 once there are hours. A cue carrying
extensions is one character, so JANE, JANE (V.O.) and
JANE (V.O.) (CONT'D) all count as JANE rather than splitting the part three ways.
The runtime is the spoken runtime. An SFX or music cue has no duration this document knows, so the report counts cues and times none of them. Guessing four seconds a cue would produce a number that looks authoritative and is invented. A scored cold open runs longer in the studio than the total here says.
Pasting a script in
Paste plain text and Storskarvia sorts the paragraphs rather than dropping them all in as
narration. A paragraph beginning SCENE, EPISODE, ACT or PART, up to 40 characters long, becomes a
scene heading. One beginning SFX: or MUSIC: becomes that cue, with the
prefix removed so the drawn label does not double it. A line in capitals on its own, under forty
characters and not ending in a full stop, question mark or exclamation mark, becomes a character
cue, and the paragraph after it becomes dialogue. Everything else is narration.
Paragraphs are separated by blank lines, so a script whose speeches run on single line breaks arrives as fewer, longer blocks.
What the reports show when the script is unfinished
- (unattributed) in the casting list means dialogue with no character cue above it. The speaker deliberately does not carry across a scene heading: a script re-cues its speaker after one, and inheriting the last one would put lines in the wrong actor's count and give them a scene they are not in.
- A character cue with nothing under it is not a line yet, so it does not appear in the casting list at all. A missing actor usually means the speech under their cue is unwritten.
- "Nothing to report yet." means the report ran and found none of what it looks for, such as a script with no cues in it.
- "Could not build that report (400)" means the document is still empty as far as the server is concerned. Type something, let the status chip settle, then reopen it.
What comes out, and in which file
The Export ▾ menu carries the layout in three formats and the cue labels in a fourth.
| Export | What it carries |
|---|---|
| Plain text (.txt) | Scene headings and character cues in capitals, and cues written
out as SFX: and MUSIC: . The only export carrying those
words. |
| Rich text (.rtf), OpenDocument (.odt), Web page (.html) | The layout: centred scene heading, indented character cue, dialogue set in under it, cues flush left, capitalised where the format capitalises. No SFX or MUSIC word, since that label is drawn rather than typed. |
| Word (.docx), Typeset PDF (.pdf) | The prose writer, so the script comes out as ordinary paragraphs. Send rich text instead when the reader needs the layout. |
Read Aloud on the Review tab is worth a pass first. A line that reads well and speaks badly is the failure mode this format has and prose does not.
The neighbouring format is the stage play, which shares the character cue and nothing else about its page: Chapter 19. Getting a finished script out to other applications is Part VIII.
Updated 2026-08-27 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?