One More Draft
Every account starts with these two samples already built, so you have something real to poke at before you write a word of your own. Both are shown here read-only, with no account and nothing to install.
A sample screenplay: a single-location two-hander, formatted to the same spec the editor and the PDF export produce. Scene headings, cues, dialogue, and transitions all sit where a reader expects them.
The Wren
A sample screenplay by
One More Draft
FADE IN:
EXT. FARMHOUSE PORCH - DUSK1
A wide plank porch wrapped around an old white farmhouse, paint gone to chalk. Beyond the rail, hayfields run flat to a treeline, every blade lit amber by a sun about to quit.
Two cane-back chairs. A low table between them. A porch lamp in a tin hood, dark. In the eaves above the door, an empty bird's nest, tidy and abandoned.
HENRY MERCER, 68, sits with a pocketknife and a pale block of basswood. Big, careful hands. Curls of wood gather on his knee. He works without hurry, without looking up.
CLAIRE MERCER, 34, stands at the rail a few feet off, charcoal blazer and city shoes wrong for the boards. A manila folder pinned under one arm. She studies the fields like she is reading a contract in them.
The knife whispers against the wood. A long time.
CLAIRE
You'll lose the light soon.
HENRY
(not looking up)
Always comes back around.
She crosses, sets the folder on the table between them, square and deliberate. He does not glance at it.
CLAIRE
The Vogels came up again. It's a good number, Dad. More than good.
HENRY
The Vogels have wanted this land since before you were born. They can want it a while longer.
CLAIRE
You can't run forty acres on your own.
HENRY
Haven't been running it. Been sitting on it.
He blows dust off the block, turns it to the light. The rough beginning of a small bird. A head. The suggestion of a folded wing.
CLAIRE
(softer)
The roof. The stairs. Last winter the pipes.
HENRY
I remember the winter.
She pulls back, recalibrates. The lawyer steps in where the daughter can't.
CLAIRE
There's a place outside the city. Twenty minutes from me. A real workshop, Dad. You'd have your tools, you'd have...
HENRY
A parking space with my name on it.
CLAIRE
You'd have me.
The knife stops for the first time.
HENRY
(quietly)
I had you here, too. Once.
She looks away, to the eaves, the empty nest.
CLAIRE
Is that the one from...
HENRY
Same one. Comes back every April. Your mother used to set a saucer up there she didn't think I knew about. Cracked corn. Spoiled that bird rotten.
CLAIRE
(almost a laugh)
She said it sang her awake.
HENRY
She said a lot of things to get out of the dishes.
A real laugh from Claire, then it catches, because laughing about Ruth still costs something. A year isn't long.
The knife resumes. Quieter now.
CLAIRE
I'm not trying to take it from you.
HENRY
I know what you're trying to do.
CLAIRE
Then why won't you...
HENRY
Because the day I sign that, the last room she stood in belongs to the Vogels.
CLAIRE
(barely)
I miss her too. You don't get to be the only one.
Henry's hands go still. He looks at his daughter, really looks, maybe the first time tonight.
He sets the knife down, works the little bird free of the block, brushes it clean with his thumb. He holds it up. Finished: a wren, mid-song, throat open.
HENRY
Been at this one a month. Couldn't get the throat right. A wren sings with its whole body. Didn't want to make a quiet one.
He reaches across the table, past the folder, and sets the wren in Claire's hands.
HENRY
Take her with you. To the new place.
Claire stares at the bird. Then at him.
CLAIRE
You already decided.
HENRY
Decided this morning. Carving's just slower than deciding.
He picks up the folder, opens it, clicks a pen, and signs. One line, no ceremony. He slides it back to her.
HENRY
House is just wood, Claire-bear. She's not in the house. She's wherever that goes.
Claire closes her fingers around the wren. She can't speak. She doesn't have to.
Henry reaches up without looking and twists the porch-lamp switch. The bulb stutters, then holds, a small warm circle against the blue coming on.
He settles back, picks up a fresh block of wood, opens the knife.
CLAIRE
(thick)
What's that one going to be?
HENRY
Don't know yet.
(first curl of wood)
That's the good part.
They sit in the lamplight. The fields go dark and easy around them. Above the door, the empty nest waits for April.
FADE OUT.
THE END
A sample novel opening, laid out the way a printed page reads. Chapters, scene breaks, and first-line indents come from the manuscript editor with no extra formatting work.
The clock had been dead for nine years, and Nora intended to keep it that way until 2 a.m., when she changed her mind.
She worked by a single lamp, the city quiet enough that she could hear the escapement when she finally coaxed it loose β that small, stubborn heartbeat of a thing built to outlive the person who wound it. It was the only sound she trusted. People lied. Tides lied. A well-cut gear told you exactly what it was and exactly what it would do, and asked nothing of you in return except that you keep it clean.
The telegram came under the door at six minutes past, the way bad news always seemed to know the hour. She read it twice. Then she set down her loupe, and for the first time since she was a girl she let a working clock keep ticking while she walked away from it.
It was nine words long. Telegrams cost by the word, and whoever had sent it had been careful, or poor, or both. FATHER DEAD STOP HOUSE IS YOURS STOP COME QUICKLY ELLORY. She did not know an Ellory. She knew, the way you know the weather is about to turn, that she would go anyway, and that going would cost her more than nine words ever could.
By dawn she had packed a single bag, cancelled three repairs, and written a note for the front door that said only CLOSED β FAMILY. She looked at the word family for a moment as if it belonged to someone else's language, then turned the sign and locked the shop and drove east, toward the sea she had sworn at eighteen she would never let near her again.
Saltmarsh was lower than she remembered. That was the first wrong thing.
You expect a town to shrink when you come back to it β the giant hill of childhood revealed as a gentle rise. What she had not braced for was the water: how it stood now where the low road used to run, flat and brown and patient, lapping at the second step of houses that had been built, a century ago, a careful and confident distance from any tide.
A boy in waders was ferrying a woman's shopping across the flooded lane in a flat-bottomed punt, and neither of them looked at it twice. People do not get used to a town drowning. Unless it has been drowning so slowly, and for so long, that getting used to it was the only way left to live there.
She left the car on the high ground by the chapel and walked the rest, her good city shoes ruined in the first ten yards. And then she heard it. Not loud. Under everything: a bell. Then another, off it by a half-beat, and a third, deep, felt in the chest more than the ear β a slow uneven peal coming up through the water, from somewhere below the flooded lane, where no church and no buoy and no living thing had any business hanging a bell.
βYou hear them, then.β
She turned. An old man stood in the doorway of the harbor office, oilskins black with salt, fingers stained with the blue-black of log-ink. He was not surprised to see her. βI'm Bram Ellory,β he said, as though that explained the telegram, the house, the water, the bells. βYou'll be Nora. You've got his hands. And you've kept the gear. Good. We're going to need it.β
βHe held it back as long as he could,β the old man said. βForty years, by hand, every night. But a man can only wind a thing so long before the thing starts winding him. Your father didn't die, Nora. He stopped. There's a difference, down here. And the difference is asking for you.β
She put her hand to the small brass gear at her throat. It was, she realized, exactly the size of the gap she had spent thirty-two years refusing to look at.
βShow me,β she said.
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