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I do my writing in MS Word.
I must incorporate some theater-like scenes into a book. In the theater-like scenes, there will be three to five characters speaking lines. Very, very occasionally a tiny bit of narration.
Do I need different software, or maybe a Word plugin?
Another free alternative is Trelby available for Windows and Linux.
A free, multiplatform, feature-rich screenwriting program!
Trelby is simple, fast and elegantly laid out to make screenwriting simple. It is infinitely configurable.
Another paid alternative is Fade In available for multiple platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, iPhone/iPad, and Android.)
It features support for multiple languages, tools for outlining, organizing, and navigating, plus extensive screenplay formatting and robust functionality for managing rewrites and revisions.
I use Scrivener. The key difference to Word is that it allows you to structure your text better. You can divide it in sections and move around, if you want.
I started to use it for writing fiction, but now I tend to use it for other documents as well because that structuring makes my thinking clearer and faster.
It also has scriptwriting features, but I haven't used them. You may want to download a free trial version and check them for yourself.
For what you want to do, script writing, you have several options, paying or free.
The best paying software truly specialized is Final draft It is a quite old soft, very well planned and relatively easy to use, but come with a price. For what I know it was at a time a kind of de facto standard in the industry, if that means something.
The best free option I am aware of is CeltX It is also quite an old software now, so you have a certain maturity. I use a pretty old version, never upgraded but when I was using it, it was a fairly decent free version of Final Draft (got some quirks here and there)
If you use either LibrOffice or OpenOffice you have a decent plugin Organon that you can find useful.
You can also simply use "template" for Microsoft Word, LibrOffice and OpenOffice. They are that said generally more limited than Celtx or FinalDraft.
Remind that at the end of the day the tools you are using do not so much matter. What you want is the job done, if you have a pretty good enough mastery of Word doing a script template is a matter of 5 minutes. For writing a whole script (movie or theatre) Final draft/Celtx are certainly profitable but just for occasional stuff, Word is quite powerful. Here is a decent explanation of how to have some script writing function in Word.
