Sparks Inbox

Not every idea arrives ready to be a Beat, Character or Setting. A Spark is a scrap in your project’s inbox.

Capturing one

Open the Sparks inbox from the Draft Workspace sidebar, type, hit Enter. Shift+Enter gives you a line break if you need more than one line in a Spark. That’s it.

For a longer idea, click the expand button in the corner of the field to write it full screen. There, Enter is a line break. Press Esc or click the close button to bring the text back to the field, then hit Enter to add it.

While you write, you can also catch an idea straight from the script. In the Write Workspace, select the text, right-click it and choose Save as Spark, or press Shift+Cmd/Ctrl+K. The text moves out of the script and into a new Spark, with one line per screenplay element or paragraph. One undo puts it back. See Write.

New Sparks appear at the top of the inbox.

Turning a Spark into a card

Drag a Spark onto any of the three rows and it becomes that kind of card:

• Onto the Throughline and it becomes a Beat
• Onto the Character Row and it becomes a Character
• Onto the Setting Row and it becomes a Setting

The Spark’s first line becomes the new card’s name or title, depending on the card type. A Character or Setting name keeps the first 50 characters. The rest becomes the Beat’s or Character’s summary, or the Setting’s description.

For a Character, lines that start with Want:, Need:, Flaw: or Notes: fill those fields instead. Everything before the first such line is the summary.

Sparks reorder within the inbox by dragging, same as anything else.

Turning a card back into a Spark

You can pull an existing card back into a Spark by dropping it on the inbox’s drop zone, useful when an idea you promoted too early needs to go back to being just an idea.

The card’s name or title becomes the Spark’s first line, and its text follows below:

• A Beat keeps its title and full summary.
• A Character keeps its name, summary, Want, Need, Flaw and notes. Each field after the summary gets its own labelled line, such as Want: the truth.
• A Setting keeps its title and description.

Drag that Spark back onto the same row and you get the same text again.

What a Spark can’t hold is lost, so Throughline asks before it converts a card that would lose something:

• A Beat loses its Setting, its Characters, and any text you’ve written in it.
• A Character loses its places in scenes, its dialogue lines and its relationships. Throughline names the scenes and asks which Character takes them over. Pick one, or type a new name to create one right in the dialog. Only when the project has no other Character can you convert without a replacement: leave the name field empty. The dialogue lines then keep the name, so they match again when the Character comes back.
• A Setting loses the scenes set in it, and Throughline names them. If the Setting is part of a pile, it leaves the pile, and the rest of the pile stays together.

A card that loses nothing converts straight away.

Changed your mind? One undo (Cmd/Ctrl+Z) turns the Spark back into the card.

Of course, Sparks don’t need to get promoted at all. Some just need to sit somewhere.