Introducing Highland Card View

The tool belt of a writer is littered with iconic emblems of the trade: a pen and paper, a typewriter and ribbon, a quill and ink, a laptop and Highland Pro. Among the necessities are any number of idiosyncratic preferences: the perfect notebook, the ideal post-it, heavy pens, tight clips, powerful staplers, fast printers, percussive hole punches, boutique fidget spinners; whatever it takes to get the work done.

But there's one tool that remains under appreciated outside the world of screenwriters: the 3x5 index card. Whether you're writing alone at a desk or alongside a team in a writers' room, the index card is a powerful organizational tool that can help you grasp the scale and scope of your entire story before you even really start writing.

It's even more powerful as the latest feature in Highland Pro: Card View. Now you can create and rearrange those cards directly within Highland with all of your changes (and rearranging) reflected in real time within your screenplay.

Let's take a look:

The beauty of index cards is their simplicity. While developing Card View, we tested numerous screenwriting software card features and found them all to feel over-engineered.

They almost felt like writing mini-games designed to make you feel good about your index card work without actually pushing you to take your cards to the next step: putting words on the page.

With Highland, we wanted to mimic the simplicity and elasticity of that classic analog workflow. I mean, we're competing with writing a couple dozen words on a blank card and tacking it up on a wall... you can't really beat that for simplicity, but you can improve how it integrates into your personal writing workflow.

How to use Highland Card View

Like all of Highlands tools, Card View is designed to be simple and impactful the very first time you use it.

To get started:

• Click into Card View in your toolbar
• Start adding Scenes, Beats, and Sections to begin organizing and populating your script; cards can be color coded
• You can also customize the arrangement of Card View to be more expansive or compact; as well as changing the orientation of the cards themselves. Whatever helps you best visualize your story
• You can add, edit, or rearrange cards directly within Card View and they will populate in real-time within the editor view

Or, you could just wing it.

In the immortal words of the late and exceptionally great David Lynch:

70 cards equals 70 scenes equals a screenplay!? He almost makes it sound easy. Maybe the real trick is in the transcendental meditation? Or, ordering the perfect milkshake from Bob's Big Boy? Or, maybe it's been lost to us, somewhere in the Black Lodge...