Freeze the version you are about to ruin, then send it to somebody and get their notes back in the margin.
Drafts in the toolbar. Freezing keeps the screenplay exactly as it stands, under a name and — more usefully — a reason.
The point is not backup. It is that you can cut the second-act chase without first having to decide whether cutting it was a good idea.
Each frozen draft records what it was when you froze it:
Those numbers are the part people find useful. Watching 8 → 11 → 9 pages across three drafts tells you something no label could.
The why box does not start empty. When you open the dialog it
fills with what has changed since your last draft —
Cut EXT. HIGHWAY CHASE · Reworked 3 scenes — worked out from
the same comparison the Compare view draws. Keep it, edit it, or
clear it; it is a starting point, not a verdict, and the moment you type,
it stops rewriting itself.
Left as it is, it turns the list of drafts into a history of the rewrite: each row already carries its reason, so a glance down the column is the story of how the screenplay got here.
Compare in the toolbar lays the last frozen draft over the working script, the changes marked on the page itself rather than in a column beside it — because a screenplay reflowed to fit a diff is not the screenplay you wrote.
A key along the foot names the colours. Marked and Clean at the top switch between the marked-up page and the working draft with the marks taken off, for reading the result rather than the change.
A gutter on the left carries the page, scene and word counts with the difference beside each, and beneath them lists only the scenes that changed — so on a hundred-page script you go straight to the three that moved. The rail on the right is given over to the notes.
The two ends are pickers. Compare with now on any draft in the Drafts dialog sets that draft against the working script, and from there either end can become another draft — or the working script itself — so "draft 2 against draft 4" is as easy to reach as "draft 3 against now".
When the later side is Now, the rail shows the open notes that hang on lines you changed, and any whose line has been cut — marked adrift. They carry the same controls as the Notes panel: who wrote it, open or resolved, a search, an order. Click one and the page goes to its line and lights it; resolve it from here; and drag the rail's inner edge wider when a slugline or a long note wants the room.
Comparing a draft against Now, every changed line offers to pull the change back into the working script — instead of copying it, closing the comparison, finding the spot and pasting.
Each asks first, spelling out what comes back, and lands as an ordinary edit — so Ctrl+Z takes it back like any other. The offer stands only against Now: a frozen draft is not a place to write.
Open a copy puts the frozen draft in front of you as a separate project, labelled with its draft name. It never replaces what you have open.
This is on purpose. "Go back to draft 2" nearly always means "put draft 2 in front of me", not "destroy what I have now" — and this way there is nothing to confirm and nothing to regret.
In this browser. If you are signed in, on the server as well, so they follow you to another machine. They also travel inside a project bundle, each in the same shape as the project itself.
A private window with storage switched off cannot freeze drafts, and the app says so rather than offering a button that does nothing.
Notes ▾ in the toolbar, then Note on this line… — a note pinned to whatever line the caret is on. The count on the button is how many are still open.
Two quicker ways to the same thing: hover any printed line and a + Note mark appears in the margin, or press Ctrl+Alt+M to note the line the caret is on (Cmd+Alt+M on a Mac). Both work in the editor and in a comparison against Now.
These are different from the Note element you can type into the script itself. A script note is part of the document and travels with it; these sit alongside, gather everybody's remarks in one list, and are what the review feature returns.
The Notes menu requires signing in, because notes live on the server — the whole point is that somebody else can write them from another machine. Signed out, the button is simply not there.
Notes ▾ → Ask someone for notes… Choose a frozen draft, type an address, and say what you want looked at. They get an email with a link.
This is for feedback, not writing — a reviewer comments, they do not edit your draft. If you want somebody to actually write, see Co-writing, where a co-writer forks a draft, writes a pass, and sends it back for you to reconcile.
The link opens Fabula One, with your draft already selected. Not a stripped-down page — the whole app, so somebody doing you a favour can see what it is, and a reviewer who writes screenplays of their own is already in the place where they would write them.
Your screenplay is never stored on their computer. It is fetched from the server each time they open it, which is also what makes Withdraw mean something.
Nothing they write reaches you until they press Send. Their drafts are kept for them, so they can start on a laptop and finish on a phone — and half a note lost to a closed tab is a note you never get.
Because otherwise there is a question with no good answer: what happens when you rewrite act two while somebody is halfway through their notes? Sending a frozen draft makes the question impossible to ask. Their notes are about a script that cannot change under them.
The same dialog lists everyone you have asked, and says whether they have opened it. A link lasts 90 days, and Withdraw closes one early.
Withdrawing does not take back the notes somebody already sent. Closing the door does not withdraw what they were kind enough to write before it closed.
Two ways, and you need neither of them open to be told. If Fabula One is in front of you, a message appears in the corner within about a minute of them pressing Send, and takes you straight to the notes. If it is not — and usually it is not, since notes tend to arrive days after the request — an email says who sent them and how many.
An envelope also appears beside your account name and stays there until you have read them — through a reload, and whether or not the project in question is the one you have open. Clicking it opens that project, fetching it back from your backup first if this device has never held it, and shows the notes.
The app only looks while somebody is actually at the keyboard. A tab left open in an empty room stops asking after a few minutes and starts again the moment you touch it, so nothing is polled on your behalf while you are not there.
Notes ▾ → All notes… shows everything: yours, and everybody's that has been sent.
The panel floats beside the script rather than over it. You can move it out of the way, and the screenplay underneath stays scrollable and editable — notes are read against the pages, and a dialog that greys out the thing it is about makes you close it to look and reopen it to remember.
While it is open, every line carrying a note is marked in yellow, like a highlighter. Click a note and the script goes to its line, which is marked more strongly and carries a bar in the margin. The panel stays open throughout.
They are listed in the order the script reads by default, not the order they arrived: notes are read against the screenplay rather than against each other, so three people who all stopped at the same weak scene belong together however far apart they wrote.
Every note carries the face of whoever wrote it, where they have set one — Account ▾ → Preferences… ▸ Profile, at their end and at yours. With three readers in one panel, a picture tells you whose note this is faster than a name at the end of it does.
Four controls at the top of the panel:
Click the line a note hangs on to jump there. A note stays attached to its line even after you rewrite it — the anchor is the line itself, not a position in the text — and when the wording has moved on, the note says what it was written against. If you cut the line entirely, the note survives at the end of the list and says so.
Resolve on a note marks it dealt with. It works on everybody's notes, not only your own — resolving is acting on the feedback, which is yours to say whoever wrote it, and it never touches what they wrote. A resolved note recedes rather than vanishes: it is still there under Resolved or All, and one click reopens it. The count on the toolbar button is the notes still open, so a note you have handled stops asking to be looked at.
When you freeze the next draft, the dialog gathers the open notes that hang on lines you changed — ticked, ready to resolve as part of freezing. Untick any you did not really address. The rewrite and the record of it happen in one motion.
You can resolve any note, but delete only your own. Asking somebody for feedback and then quietly deleting it is not a feature.
Notes is one of the parts in the Export dialog. It prints them in script order, each under the line it belongs to, with the page that line falls on.
The page number is what makes it worth printing. "p.71" is the difference between a list of opinions and a set of instructions.