Chapter 19 · Formats
Writing a Stage Play
A play is not a screenplay with different margins. It has a cast page, acts and scenes that own their own pages, character cues down the middle, and a page number that carries the act and scene with it. This chapter covers the nine elements you type, the front matter you fill in once, and the three house styles the same play can be exported in.
Starting a play
In the Studio, choose Stage play in the Type list of the New project form. The type is fixed once the project exists, so a play started as a novel cannot be converted later. Chapter 2 covers that.
The editor opens with an Elements tab in the ribbon alongside Home, Review and View. Three buttons live on it: Title Page, Play Setup, and Simultaneous. The element dropdown itself sits on the Home tab, where you will spend your time.
The nine elements
Every paragraph in the manuscript is one of nine element types. The dropdown on Home names all nine; five of them also answer to a number key.
| Element | Key | How it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Act | ⌘1 | Centred, capitals, and a new page in the exported play. |
| Scene | Centred, with a rule under it in the default house. | |
| Setting | Indented, and it prints its own Setting: label. | |
| At Rise | The same, labelled At Rise:. | |
| Song lyric | Capitals, one indent in. | |
| Stage direction | ⌘2 | Three indents in, at the house's setting for upright or italic. |
| Character | ⌘3 | The cue, centred and in capitals. |
| Parenthetical | ⌘4 | A short direction on its own line, in brackets. You do not type the brackets. |
| Dialogue | ⌘5 | The speech itself, full width under the cue. |
Do not type the labels. Setting and At Rise carry theirs, and the parenthetical supplies its own brackets. Type one anyway and the exporter strips the duplicate, so the play still comes out right.
Enter, Tab, and the numbers
Enter moves you to the element that usually follows, so the opening of a scene types itself in order: Act, then Scene, then Setting, then At Rise, then the play. After that, Enter on a character cue gives you dialogue, and Enter on dialogue gives you the next character cue. Stage direction and Song lyric repeat themselves, because you rarely write just one line of either.
Pressing Enter on a line you have left empty changes that line's type instead of splitting it, so you can walk down the opening of a scene without leaving blank paragraphs behind you.
Tab changes the element you are on rather than indenting. From a character cue it gives dialogue, from dialogue a stage direction, from a stage direction a character cue. Every structural element, Act, Scene, Setting, At Rise and Song lyric, tabs to a stage direction. ⇧Tab runs the lookup backwards: from dialogue it hands back Character, and from a stage direction it lands on Scene, which is the first element in that table Tab turns into a direction.
Esc leaves the manuscript for the ribbon. Tab will not, so this is the way out from the keyboard. The full list is in Chapter 10.
Play Setup: the front matter
The cast page is not typed into the manuscript. Open Play Setup on the Elements tab and fill it in once:
- House style, covered below. The note under the dropdown says what the selected house actually changes.
- Subtitle / genre, for a line like "A play in two acts".
- Copyright line, which prints in the bottom left of the cover.
- Cast of characters. Each Add character gives a row with a name and a description ("JOHN DOE", "45, a university professor."). The × removes a row, and a row left completely empty is dropped on save.
- Place and Time, printed centred under the cast.
- Musical numbers, a title and who sings it. Leave it empty if the play is not a musical and the page is skipped entirely.
The title, the "by" line and the contact block come from the separate Title Page button beside it. The Draft date field there belongs to the screenplay cover and is not printed on a play.
Play Setup is the document owner's. If a play has been shared with you, every field is disabled and Save reads "The document owner sets up the play." The save route would keep the owner's settings regardless, so the dialog refuses rather than closing on a change that was never going to happen.
House style
Theatres and publishers do not all ask for the same page. Three starting points ship with Storskarvia, and switching between them re-exports the same manuscript without touching a word of it.
| SFI / Sewanee | Dramatists Guild | Samuel French | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Page numbers | II - 1 - 51 | Plain | Plain |
| Stage directions | Upright, 1.5in in | Italic, 1.5in in | Italic, 2in in |
| Scene label | Underlined | Plain | Plain |
| New scene | New page | New page | Runs on |
| Carry-over cue | (Cont.) | (CONT'D) |
(CONT'D) |
These are starting points and the dialog says so. Houses revise their guidelines, and a commissioning theatre usually sends its own sheet with the submission call. That sheet is the one that counts. A play with no house chosen exports as SFI.
Two characters at once
Select two consecutive speeches, then click Simultaneous. A speech means a character cue plus everything under it: dialogue, parentheticals, and lyrics, since two characters can sing at the same time. The two speeches become side-by-side columns of equal width, which is what a play asks for.
If the selection is anything else, nothing happens and you get the message "Select two consecutive speeches (CHARACTER + dialogue, twice) to make them dual." The usual cause is a stage direction caught between the two speeches, or a selection that starts halfway through the first one. With the cursor inside an existing pair, the same button splits it back into ordinary speeches.
Pages, acts, and continuations
The cover, the cast page and the musical numbers are unnumbered. Page 1 is the first page of the play itself.
In the SFI house the number carries the act and scene, so page 51 of Act II, Scene 1 reads
II - 1 - 51. Those numbers are counted, not read. Storskarvia counts
Act elements and Scene elements as it goes down the document, so the act you labelled "ACT TWO"
still numbers as II. A play with no Act or Scene elements at all falls back to a plain page
number.
When a speech runs over a page break, the cue repeats at the top of the next page with the house's continuation mark after it. That happens in the PDF only. Word repaginates the file on the reader's machine with their fonts and their printer, so where a speech breaks is not knowable here, and writing a carry-over line into the .docx would put it mid-page as often as not.
Text you struck through with tracked changes is cut from the exported play. A submission should not carry the writer's deleted dialogue into a theatre's copy.
What comes out, and in which file
Two exports in the Export ▾ menu are written by the play writer and carry everything above:
- Word (.docx), which is what most submissions actually go out in. Acts and scenes open new Word sections, so the running header can carry a different act and scene, and the page number is a real Word field that stays right when the file is edited.
- Typeset PDF (.pdf), 12pt Times New Roman, single spaced, one inch margins.
Rich text, OpenDocument, web page and plain text keep the element indents and alignment but none of the play furniture: no cover, no cast page, no act pagination, no house style.
Two limits worth knowing before you reach for them. Watermarked draft PDF and PDF with revision stars are offered for every format, and a stage play PDF comes out of both without the watermark and without the stars. If you need a watermarked play today, watermark the PDF after it downloads.
The neighbouring format is the screenplay, which shares the character cue and the parenthetical and little else: Chapter 16. Renaming a character works in a play as it does in a script, in Chapter 18. Moving a finished play in and out of other applications is Part VIII.
Updated 2026-08-26 · Full contents · Something wrong or missing?