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Free Screenplay Pacing Map

See how a draft is distributed across its own clock: action share, scene density, and cast arrival, tenth by tenth, against a published screenplay corpus. Private in your browser.

Pacing map

Paste a draft or open a file. It is parsed in this browser and measured against the published corpus. The corpus is English-language screenplays, so a draft in another language is placed against those word counts.

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Fountain or Final Draft screenplay

Title: Low Tide
Credit: Written by
Author: Sample Draft
Draft date: Sample

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - DAWN

Rain crawls down the glass. A radio hisses between stations. MAREN, forties, stands at the window with a cold mug, watching a trawler that should not be there.

She sets the mug down. Picks up binoculars. Lowers them without adjusting the focus.

MAREN
That's the Aster.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - CONTINUOUS

Maren pulls a ledger from the shelf. Flips. Stops.

A page has been torn out. The edge is still ragged, the fibers still white.

EXT. DOCK - MORNING

Gulls. Diesel. The trawler sits high in the water, unloaded.

DEV, twenties, coils rope with the concentration of a man avoiding a conversation.

MAREN
Where's your father?

DEV
(not looking up)
Out.

MAREN
The boat's in.

DEV
Then he's not out on the boat.

Maren looks at the hull. Fresh paint over an older name, the letters still legible under the roller marks.

EXT. DOCK - CONTINUOUS

She walks the length of the Aster. Nets dry. Ice hold open and empty. Not a scale on the deck.

A boat that went out and caught nothing, and came back without trying.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - DAY

Maren spreads the ledger across the desk and works it line by line, matching manifests to landings, and the arithmetic stops making sense somewhere in the middle of March.

She writes three names on a scrap of paper. Crosses out two.

The phone rings. She lets it.

It rings again. She picks up.

MAREN
Harbor.

CALLER (V.O.)
You pulled the March book.

MAREN
Who is this?

CALLER (V.O.)
Put it back.

The line dies. Maren sets the receiver down very carefully, as though it might still be listening.

EXT. HARBOR ROAD - DAY

Maren's van. Wipers on their slowest setting. She drives past the fish market, past the chandlery, past a hand-painted sign for a haulage yard.

She slows. Reverses. Reads the sign again.

EXT. HAULAGE YARD - DAY

Chain link. A dog that does not bark. Behind the fence, a refrigerated lorry with its engine running and nobody in the cab.

Maren photographs the plate through the wire.

INT. VAN - CONTINUOUS

She sits with the camera in her lap and does not start the engine for a long moment.

Then she does.

INT. MAREN'S KITCHEN - NIGHT

She lays the photographs across the table in the order she took them. Reaches for the ledger.

It is not in her bag.

She checks the bag twice, the way people do.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - NIGHT

The office door is unlocked. It should not be.

The ledger is back on its shelf, squared to the edge more neatly than she has ever left it.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - CONTINUOUS

Maren opens the drawer where she keeps the spare radio.

Inside: the torn page. Folded twice. Put there by somebody who wanted her to find it.

EXT. DOCK - DAWN

The Aster's berth is empty. The mooring lines are gone, coiled and taken, not cut.

Maren stands at the edge and looks at flat gray water.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - DAY

She flattens the torn page under the desk lamp. A column of weights. A column of dates. A third column of initials that appear nowhere else in the book.

MAREN
(to herself)
Who signs for a landing that never landed.

INT. CHANDLERY - DAY

ISOBEL, sixty, does not look up from the till.

MAREN
Three initials. J. R. T.

ISOBEL
That's a question shaped like a statement.

MAREN
It's a question.

ISOBEL
Then you already know I'm not going to answer it in a shop.

Isobel puts a chit in the drawer. Closes the drawer. Looks at Maren for the first time.

ISOBEL (CONT'D)
Come at six. Round the back.

EXT. CHANDLERY YARD - EVENING

Rain again, harder now. Isobel unlocks a store room and does not turn on the light.

ISOBEL
Your father ran this office for thirty years and never once pulled a March book.

MAREN
He also never asked why the boats came home empty.

ISOBEL
He asked. Once.

She hands Maren a bundle of chits held with a rubber band.

ISOBEL (CONT'D)
Then he stopped.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - NIGHT

Maren works the chits against the torn page. Three hours compressed into the sound of paper and one held breath.

The initials resolve. Not a person. A company. And the company holds the lease on the berth she is sitting above.

She photographs everything, twice, and mails the photographs to herself.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - LATER

She is still there when the light outside changes.

EXT. DOCK - DAWN

The Aster comes back in on the tide, riding high, and ties up in a berth that is not hers.

DEV steps off before the lines are fast.

EXT. DOCK - CONTINUOUS

Maren is waiting at the bollard.

DEV
Don't.

MAREN
I already did.

DEV
Then you know it isn't him.

MAREN
I know it isn't only him.

Dev looks back at the boat. Nobody else comes off it.

DEV
He's going to say he did it for me.

MAREN
He might have.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - DAY

Maren places the chits, the page, and the photographs in a single envelope. Seals it. Writes an address she has to look up.

She holds it over the out tray.

INT. HARBOR OFFICE - CONTINUOUS

Dev in the doorway. He does not come in.

DEV
If you send that, I lose the boat.

MAREN
If I don't, somebody loses more than a boat.

Silence. Rain on the window, steady now, no longer crawling.

DEV
I know.

He crosses the room, takes the envelope out of her hand, and puts it in the tray himself.

EXT. HARBOR - DUSK

The envelope goes into the postbox on the quay.

Maren and Dev stand a little apart, watching the water do what it always does.

The tide turns.

FADE OUT.

Paste Fountain, or choose a .fountain / .txt file up to 2 MB — or a .fdx up to 12 MB.5,414 / 1,000,000

Useful output, not a score

What this tool gives you

Your curve on the corpus band

See action share and cast arrival across ten equal stretches of your own draft, drawn over the middle half of a published feature corpus.

The rhythm in one line

Every scene as a segment sized by its share of the draft, so a stalled stretch and a set piece are visible at a glance rather than inferred from page numbers.

Position, not a grade

Percentile placement for scene count, median scene length, longest-tenth concentration, silent scenes, cast size, and dialogue concentration — and a plain notice when your draft sits outside the population it is being measured against.

How to use it

1
Paste or open a draft
Fountain or Final Draft. Parsing happens in this browser.
2
Read the curves before the numbers
Compare the shape of your action and cast-arrival lines against the corpus band, then look at where the scenes cluster.
3
Take the memo into the rewrite
Copy or download a plain-text readout to paste into notes or a save point before you start cutting.

Questions writers ask

Does this tell me where my act breaks are?

No. It measures where narrative words, scenes, and speaking characters actually fall across your draft. Naming a beat is a semantic reading; a word-position measurement cannot make it, and a tool that claims otherwise is guessing.

What is it comparing my draft to?

Aggregate distributions from the Screenplay Anatomy Atlas — published quantiles across a corpus of feature screenplays. No screenplay text is stored or shown, and your draft is never added to the corpus.

Does my screenplay leave the browser?

Only if you choose Continue in Plot. Parsing and measurement run in this page. Continue in Plot sends a copy of the script so it opens as a new Plot project, and Inkwell keeps that copy for 24 hours.

My draft is a short. Is the comparison still meaningful?

Partly, and the tool says which parts. Whole-draft measures still place the excerpt, but per-tenth scene counts come from feature-length work, so those verdicts are withheld and share-of-scenes is shown instead. The corpus inclusion thresholds your draft misses are listed with the readout.

Defined in the glossary

Free Screenplay Length Checker

Check a feature, pilot, or short against page-count practice, official contest windows, and a published feature corpus — then export a memo you can send with the draft.

Open tool

Free Script Breakdown Tool

Break down a Fountain or Final Draft screenplay privately in your browser: scene sheets, eighths, cast, locations, day/night, and exportable CSVs.

Open tool

Free Screenplay Analyzer

Analyze scene pacing, dialogue/action balance, character share, and locations from a Fountain screenplay—privately in your browser, with free CSV reports.

Open tool

Continue in Plot and keep writing, with the screenplay formatting done for you.

Start writing in Plot Read the related guide

Free Screenplay Pacing Map

What this tool gives you

Your curve on the corpus band

The rhythm in one line

Position, not a grade

How to use it

Paste or open a draft

Read the curves before the numbers

Take the memo into the rewrite

Questions writers ask

Does this tell me where my act breaks are?

What is it comparing my draft to?

Does my screenplay leave the browser?

My draft is a short. Is the comparison still meaningful?

Defined in the glossary

Keep working with the draft

Free Screenplay Length Checker

Free Script Breakdown Tool

Free Screenplay Analyzer