Setting a play or a screenplay
Two jobs get confused here, and the confusion costs people months.
The first job is submission. A screenplay sent to an agent, a producer or a competition has a rigid format — fixed margins, a fixed courier-style face, elements in fixed positions — and that format is not a design. It exists so the document can be measured: a reader estimates running time from the page count, and a production breaks the script down into scenes, days and locations off the page geometry itself. Change it and you have made the document harder to use, and marked yourself as somebody who has not worked in the business.
If you are submitting, use the format the industry expects, produced in the software the industry uses, and do not typeset it. Nothing below applies to you.
The second job is publication. A play or a screenplay issued as a book is a different object: it is set to be read, in sequence, by somebody holding it. That book is what this guide is about.
What a reading edition has to do
A reader of a published script needs four things at a glance: who is speaking, what they say, what is happening around them, and where they are in the structure. Every decision below serves one of those four.
A cast list at the front. Characters in order of appearance or in order of importance, with a line of description where it helps, plus the setting and period. In a play this is the dramatis personae and readers look for it; in a published screenplay it is just as useful and is usually left out.
Act and scene headings that are findable. A reader of a script jumps around far more than a reader of a novel. Set act openings like chapter openings, scene headings a clear step below them, and generate the contents from that structure so both levels are listed.
Character names set one way, always. Small caps or bold, one choice, every instance. Consistency is what lets the eye skip down the left edge of a page and find a speaker without reading. Mixing bold for some and caps for others destroys that in a way readers feel but do not diagnose.
Stage directions visually distinct from speech. Italic is the usual answer, often with an indent, sometimes in brackets. Directions inside a speech — a pause, a movement — go in italic in brackets so they do not read as words said aloud.
The layout decision that settles everything
There are two conventions for placing a speaker's name, and picking one is the real work.
Above the speech, centered. This is the screenplay shape: the name on its own centered line, the dialogue in a narrow block under it. It is what the submission format looks like, so authors reach for it by reflex.
Beside the speech, as a hanging indent. This is the traditional play shape: the name sits at the left margin, the speech starts on the same line and every following line indents to clear it.
Beside-it wins in a book, for a plain reason. Above-it spends a whole line on every speech, and a script is mostly short speeches. A page of quick exchanges spends a large share of its lines on names alone, which at book trim sizes means a longer book, a wider spine and a higher print cost for the same words. Beside-it is compact and reads faster, because the name and the first words of the speech arrive in the same eye movement.
Beside-it has one rule you cannot skip: runover lines must be indented. If the second line of a speech returns to the left margin, it sits exactly where a character name sits, and the reader reads it as a new speaker for a fraction of a second on every long speech. Set the indent deep enough to clear your longest name, and use the same indent throughout.
The narrow measure this leaves is worth checking against your margins before you commit — see Margins and gutters.
In the Interior Formatter. It reads a .docx for structure — chapter starts, italics, bold, scene breaks — so a script that was styled consistently in the manuscript imports as structure rather than as a wall of paragraphs. Previews are free, unlimited and watermarked, so pour an act and look at real pages before you set the whole book. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
Page turns
A speech that runs across a page break must not leave the character name alone at the foot of a page with the speech starting overleaf. It is the script equivalent of a widow, and it is worse, because the reader arrives at the top of the next page with no idea who is talking.
The two fixes are the ordinary ones: push the whole speech to the next page, or pull enough lines back that the name has company. Where a long speech genuinely has to split, the convention is to repeat the character name at the top of the continuation page followed by a continued mark, so the reader is never guessing.
Scene headings get the same treatment as chapter openings: never stranded at the bottom of a page with nothing under them.
Styles in the manuscript are what carry over
A script is structure, and structure survives the trip out of a word processor only if it was expressed as styles rather than as manual spacing. Character names typed in capitals with tabs, and stage directions indented by hitting the space bar, arrive as undifferentiated paragraphs. Names set in a real style, directions in a real style, italics applied as italics — that arrives as a script.
Do that work once in the manuscript, before you typeset anything. It is the same discipline any book needs, only more load-bearing here: see Preparing a manuscript that typesets cleanly.
If your play is in verse, the line is the unit and a different set of rules takes over. Read Setting poetry without wrecking it before you set a word of it.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Setting poetry without wrecking it · More: Ligatures, kerning and small caps · Chapter openings and scene breaks · Reflowable text, and the things that break it