While writing a twin cinema poem this week, I discovered a new way to format twin cinema. While my way is probably not the most ideal for official submissions with font and other formatting requirements, it’s great for just initial drafting to get words out.
Previously, I’ve always used Microsoft Word or Pages to format my parallel poems. It works, but it takes forever and I end up worrying about formatting rather than the writing.
NOTE: This way for quick drafting requires a basic knowledge of the Fountain screenwriting syntax and a Fountain editor like Slugline or Highland 2 for preview and export. A list of Fountain editors, compiled by the fountain.io website, can be found here.
Twin cinema is a Singaporean poetic form written in two columns parallel to each other. The twin cinema can be read three ways – the left poem alone, the right poem alone, and across both as a singular poem. It’s a bit confusing, but is a fun poetic form to read and write.
One example is the 2018 junior winning entry for The Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition.
Fountain is a plain-text markup format for writing screenplays by John August. That means your scripts are accessible on any device capable of reading and editing text. Fountain just gives plain text some extra directions that allow apps to format your text into a proper screenplay.
In this case, you need to know how to force dialogue, leave whitespace, centre text and write dual dialogue.
Centring Text
Text can be centred in Fountain by wrapping the line in > and < inequality symbols. You can ‘stack’ multiple lines on top of each other like this:
>Example center stanza line.<
>Example center line.<
Rendered by Slugline, this looks like:
Forcing Dialogue
Forcing dialogue can be done by putting a @ in front of the character’s name. For example, if I wanted to force the character JOHN, I would write:
@JOHN
Insert dialogue here.
For twin cinema, you probably don’t want to have the character’s name in front of every. single. stanza. So what you can do instead is force a space, like this:
@
Insert stanza here.
The space isn’t visible here, but you can highlight the block above to see that I left a space. What I did for my characters was leave 1 space for Character 1 on the left side and 2 spaces for Character 2 on the right, but it doesn’t actually matter. Fountain still renders both sides regardless of how many spaces there are.
Dual Dialogue and Leaving Whitespace
Dual dialogue in screenwriting is when two characters say the same thing in unison. For twin cinema, it allows the two characters’ stanzas to be presented on the same line without extra formatting (except whitespace, of course).
CHARACTER 1
Insert stanza here.
CHARACTER 2 ^
Insert stanza here.
But what if Character 1’s line goes for two lines, while Character 2’s is one line? The software will probably assume that you’re starting a new line and it won’t connect that to the character’s previous lines in the stanza. And that’s where whitespace comes in.
To leave whitespace (or a blank line) in Fountain, put two spaces in that line.
CHARACTER 1
This is
a two liner.
And the poem
continues here.
CHARACTER 2 ^
This is a one-liner.
Next line.
And this is how it looks in preview, rendered by Slugline:
With the character-name-as-space trick I mentioned earlier in Forcing Dialogue, it looks like this:
This way, when Character 2 says ‘next line’, it won’t be put onto the same line as ‘a two liner’. Instead, it’ll go onto the next line to ‘And the poem’, which is probably what you intended.
And that’s how I format my twin cinema poems in Fountain during drafting. Hope this helped!