Screenplay to Novel

It's a pity we don't yet have a feature that's coming in the next year, which is the ability to have multiple expressions of the same script side by side, e.g. a screenplay version next to a novel version.

I don't think you should be doing a workflow of building a novel in a separate lane. Presumably, the story is the same, with just some beats added or disabled. So you should work with the beats as they are, and simply change the text to novel.

Now, about the text formatting itself, we're in a weird middle state where documents have a "type", either a screenplay or a novel. As I said, in the future, these will just be separate documents shown side by side. Screenplays will have screenplay formatting, and novels will have novel formatting.

But for now, the entire document is *either* a screenplay or a novel, so you won't be able to gradually transition to novel. And you can't even change the mode, because we were expecting this side by side feature to roll out sooner, so there aren't facilities in the app to convert between document types. It's something we can do for you, or instruct you how to do. It's a major omission, and not pretty.

So I'd suggest that you stay in a screenplay format for a while, and write all your work as action lines. You can also go into paragraph styles and change the style for action lines so they look like novels, e.g. Times New Roman, first line indent, no space after paragraph. That way, you can transition the text to something that looks and feels like a novel, while actually still being a screenplay.