User blog comment:Owenandheatherfan/I Just Don't Get It!/@comment-1874924-20110403014020

Part of it may be the influence of fanfiction.net, where script format is actually forbidden.

I touched on the question of format in the Writer's Workshop I hosted last year. (If you haven't seen it, we have a series of Workshops, which you can access through the "Community" menu at the top of the Activity Feed page.) I don't have a problem with script format, myself, but I recommend that it be left to aspiring playwrights and screenwriters. Some writers, though, find that dialogue is the only thing they can write well; and for them, script format may be the best choice.

The main limitation of script format is that it requires a visual medium (theater, TV, etc.) to provide most of the action. Whereas narrative styles show both what the characters are saying and what they are doing, script format pretty much shows only what they are saying. A fanfic-specific problem, which Mrdaimion mentioned, is that script format tends to attract lazy and/or unskilled writers because it's the easiest format to write, so a higher percentage of script-format stories are poorly written than is the case with narrative-format stories.

If you want to write in script format, I strongly suggest that you use complex dialogue. In other words, vary the sentence length, vary the length of time a character talks before the next character speaks, and so on. If a script-format story has everyone speaking only one or two short sentences before the next character speaks, most potential readers are going to assume that the story isn't very good, and will quickly abandon it.