Free screenwriting software built from your answers

01

Pick a format and a depth

Feature film, TV pilot, microdrama series, Brand Story, novel and more: nine formats in all. Then choose how deep to go, from a 12-question sketch to the full 74-question development pass.

02

Build the cast

Around twenty questions per character, aimed at dramatic function: what they want, what blocks them, how they change. Hair colour never comes up. The system maps every character onto your story structure as you answer.

03

Answer the story questions

Screenburn asks what working screenwriters ask themselves. Where does Act Two turn? What claim does the story argue? What does the midpoint reverse? Your answers become the architecture of the script.

04

Write in SceneBurner

Your answers generate a scene-by-scene structure. Open a scene and write, with industry-standard formatting, six element types, keyboard shortcuts, and AI suggestions on tap when you want them. Export to Final Draft, Fountain, or PDF when the draft locks.

Guided story development

A structured questionnaire tuned to your format: three-act scaffolding for features, series-engine questions for pilots, episode-and-arc questions for vertical seasons, economy prompts for shorts. Depth adjusts across four levels.

Four depth levels, 12 to 74 questions, format-aware

Retention Engine

Watch whether your story grabs an audience and holds it, scene by scene and across a full season. Long-form work gets its own read. It runs while you write, and no AI reads a word of your script.

Audience retention insight, free on every account

Character function mapping

Twenty questions per character, aimed at dramatic function: protagonist, antagonist, mentor, ally. The system tracks each character’s relation to your thematic argument rather than their biography.

~20 questions per character, archetype system

SceneBurner screenplay editor

An editor built for scripts. Six element types: scene heading, action, character, parenthetical, dialogue, transition. Keyboard shortcuts keep formatting out of your way; scene notes, guidance callouts, and per-scene version history keep the work safe.

6 element types, shortcuts, per-scene versions

AI Suggests

Free AI suggestions on every question. Stuck on the Act Two turn? Suggests offers format-aware starting points you can take, twist, or ignore. Every AI operation lands in a log you can read.

Free on all accounts, every operation logged

Writer privacy wall

Suggestions, structure checks, and retention insight all work from your answers and your scene structure. The AI never receives your screenplay text. The single exception, Studio voice analysis, runs on your explicit consent and at no other time.

AI works from answers, never from your pages

Nine formats, one tool

Feature film, TV pilot, short film, microdrama series, YouTube Shorts, novel, short story, Scripted Reality, and Brand Story. Switch across the screenplay and prose formats mid-development when the story changes shape; the system recomputes your scene structure on the switch.

Format switching with compatibility checks

Professional export

Nine export formats cover the industry: Final Draft XML for submissions, Fountain for open workflows, PDF for the table, DOCX and EPUB for prose, Markdown and plain text for version control, and treatments for the pitch.

FDX, Fountain, PDF, DOCX, EPUB, RTF, Markdown, TXT, Treatment

Version history with diffs

Every save writes a version. Compare any two side by side, see the exact changes between drafts, and roll back without losing current work.

Unlimited versions, side-by-side diffs

Studio Writers Room

Hand it a brief and the Writers Room drafts a full first pass: concept, characters, every scene. Take the draft as raw material and make it yours. Twenty drafts a month on the Studio tier.

Full first-pass drafts, Studio tier

Feature film

You know the ending. The middle is fog.

You hold a premise and a climax and sixty blank pages between them. The 74-question deep path walks Act Two turn by turn: midpoint reversal, mounting complications, subplot weave. By the time you open SceneBurner, every scene knows why it exists.

TV pilot

Your pilot has to sell a season

Buyers read for the machine that makes episode fifty as watchable as episode one. Screenburn asks the series-engine questions up front, what conflict recurs, what makes the world renewable, and builds the pilot and the pitch in the same pass.

Short film

Economy or nothing

A short collapses under anything that skips the central idea. The 12-question sketch pins your premise, your single dramatic question, and your resolution before you write a word, and every scene that follows earns its place or goes.

Novel or short story

Prose with a skeleton

You want structural scaffolding without writing a screenplay. Screenburn applies guided development to prose: chapter architecture for novels, single-effect compression for short stories, exports to EPUB, DOCX, or Markdown.