photo credit: zappowbang

The Dvorak keyboard, one of those weird ideas that makes sense but no one in their right mind will learn. I mean, we have a layout that’s been used for a really long time, that’s a difficult habit to break! Well, let me just say this: I’m typing this in Dvorak, and I love it.

Yes, that weird layout is what I happily type in. In fact, I not only type faster in Dvorak than in QWERTY, which is kind of the point, but I find it a lot more comfortable as well.

Why Dvorak?
I’m lazy. I really don’t like doing something the “right” way if I can do it faster the wrong way. QWERTY is what I learned in school but they layout never quite worked for me so I looked into what people were using as an alternative and found Dvorak.

There’s a history behind the QWERTY layout and Dvorak layout that I really don’t want to go into, so I’ll sum it up: qwerty’s layout is random and Dvorak is based on which letters are used most for the home keys. I mean, no one thinks having the semi-colon on the home row is brilliant.  Ah, that useful semi-colon, comes in handy all the time!

How to start using Dvorak
This may come as a shock, but just start using it. Every source I’ve read says you can pick it up in a few weeks, it took me several months which leads me to conclude that I’m dumb and stubborn.  Go me.

I started with stickers on my keys but that didn’t work too well, the stickers had a habit of coming off. The reason I didn’t just pop the keys out and switch them was because the keys are not all the same shape, it was like typing on a keyboard that needed dental work.

After fighting with the stickers until I had a quasi-reasonable grasp of where the keys are, I then kept an image of the layout as a desktop background. If I ever forgot where a key was, I’d check the desktop. Throughout this, I kept doing typing exercises until I just remembered where all the keys were.

Do I ever use QWERTY?
Have to.  The login page for my iMac is set to qwerty and I haven’t the foggiest clue how to set it to dvorak.  To this day it drives me bonkers.

To make a long post short, I highly recommend switching to Dvorak if your wrists hurt and you want to start typing like you did when you first were allowed near a keyboard!

The 3 act structure is one of the best tools to write a screenplay, even though it has 4 acts.  I’ll get to that in second, but first, here’s a breakdown of the 3 acts.

Act 1: The Setting

The first half-an-hour of a film is Act I and it sets up the world.  Kick it off with an interesting first image.  This can be a static shot or a series of shots that sets up the story’s mood, texture, time and place.  The main characters, their situation and back-story are introduced in this act.  Everything builds to a twist or turn in the story which propels our hero into a new direction, called a turning point, which kicks off Act 2.

Act 2: The Complication

Otherwise known as 60 minutes of something.  I like to think of Act 2 as 2 separate acts of 30 minutes each.  Obstacles are thrown at our hero until one hour into the film where we hit another turning point that flips the whole story on it’s head.  This leads into Act 2.5 where even more obstacles are thrown at our hero until it looks like he’s been defeated.  This is where he loses the girl or his best friend is killed or he loses the will to keep moving forward (or all of the above with some salt poured into a wound).  That is, until he has an epiphany or a final piece of information is given to him.  This is the final turning point that signals the beginning of Act 3.

Act 3: The Resolution

The final 30 minutes of the film kicks into high gear, usually with some sort of countdown.  A time bomb is the most obvious example or the hero has to go crash a wedding before his true love says “I do.”  This leads to the big finish, and it has to be a big finish.  “Lets blow this thing and go home” take-out-the-Death-Star kind of finish followed by a short 1-5 page resolution that ties up any unresolved story threads.

There you have it in a nutshell, the 3 act structure in 4 acts.  There’s quite a lot more to crafting the structure to your screenplay, but this is a good start to crafting your screenplay.

photo credit: Singapor3