Many Execs Listen To Your Screenplays Now

I was driving to the movies with an executive friend the other day, and something surprised me when I jumped into his car. He wasn’t listening to the radio. He was listening to a screenplay.

I quickly emailed a few other friends and found that many execs in my circle listen to scripts like audiobooks. It’s pretty easy if you have a PDF. Sure, the voices are a little computerized, but there are actually a few out there that sound less digitized.

This revelation made me think… if I knew they were listening to my script instead of reading it, how would I write it differently?

Let’s dive into the topic.

How to Listen to a PDF

Before we get into the writing, I figured we should go over the programs you can use to listen to screenplays.

• Adobe Acrobat Reader: Open the PDF, click View in the top-left menu, then Read Out Loud. You can choose to read the entire document or just the page you’re on. You can also press Shift+Ctrl+Y to activate Read Out Loud.
• Speechify: This PDF audio reader is available on the web, as a Chrome extension, or as a mobile app for Android and iOS. It uses text-to-speech and OCR technology to read aloud any digital or physical text, and supports over 30 languages.
• Read Aloud: This Chrome extension reader can be used to read PDFs saved to your computer. Right-click the file, select Open With, and choose Google Chrome. Once it opens, select the Read Aloud icon.

Listening to Scripts vs. Reading Them 

I have to admit, I was kind of paranoid about the fact that people were listening to the scripts, but I also want to make sure I am giving myself the best shot. So how would I tweak my writing knowing that someone is listening?

I’m a pretty basic writer. I try to keep my action lines sparse, my dialogue snappy, and make my scenes transition with some sort of flow. The first thing I did when I heard this was listen to one of my screenplays.

I felt like it sounded okay? Truly, it was hard to judge. But I understood the appeal. You can also speed up the voice, and I found it went played back about 1.5 times the speed I feel like people typically read at, and I also liked that I could walk around the house and do chores while I listened.

Something I noticed that did stood out was that typos are much more glaring. It would throw the whole sentence off, and then I would bump out of the story to try to figure out what was supposed to be there.

Now, I usually pay to have my scripts spell-checked, so I’m personally less afraid of that as a concern, but it is something to think about. Outside of that, I’ll say that long action scenes and pages multiple pages without dialogue tend to get tedious. I felt like they read better on the page. but also, they made me conscious of how much I could cut down later, just to get the point across.

Finally, the robot voices were boring. But I know a few people who paid a premium for services that would assign different robot voices to different characters. I listened to those, and they were much better.

At the end of the day, I think these were all generally good lessons to know.

Have you ever used any of these programs or know anyone who has?

Let me know what you think in the comments.