Screenwriting competitions can be a brutal introduction to film industry fickleness. That’s half their value. You may believe that you and you alone have cracked the code of writing that one-in-a-million spec script, but entering a script competition is a direct way to discover that, yes, there are other screenwriters out there and even – quelle horreur! – that some of those writers might have stronger scripts than you.
But that’s no reason to be put off.
Writers with the best long-term chances of success will use the experience as a chance to get feedback, improve their screenplays, and come back better next year. These are the writers that end up winning competitions – the ones who’ve been knocked down five times but have stood up six, the ones who stand tall on the pile of ‘Unfortunately, […]’ emails to laugh in the face of rejection. No one is born with a God-given talent for screenwriting; a learned tenacity and hardworking attitude are the strongest predictors of screenwriting success that we’ve come to identify over the years.
Master Kavar: I thought you had died in the Mandalorian Wars…
Kreia: “Die”? No — became stronger, yes.— Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords
While it’s futile to reduce the entire craft of screenwriting to a list of questions and answers, we’ve identified a handful of age-old techniques to ensure the best possible chances of competition success for your script. Interrogation is one. Brutal, uncompromising interrogation – Jack Bauer style. You can even read the questions in his voice if it helps.
Sound easy? Well, open up that copy of your submission script, lash yourself to your desk chair, and scream these tough questions into a mirror until you’re blue in the face…
Is Your Protagonist Active?
… or do plot beats in the script simply happen to your lead character? Does your protagonist have a clearly defined goal and obstacles standing in their way? Do they take the fight to the antagonist, rather than waiting to get hit? Do they care deeply enough about their mission? Can they inspire others to join them? Are they – despite complications – the master of their own fate within the screenplay?
Is Your Opening Character-Driven and Punchy?
… or do you open with a generic, low-energy introduction like a pan across a bedroom to an alarm clock? Are you intelligently subverting the standard tropes of screenplay openings? Are you establishing the genre to the audience? Are you showing your lead character (and the actor playing them) in their best light? If opening with an action set-piece, is it memorable and does it tell us something about your characters? Are you laying the groundworks of characterisation through visual, aural and verbal cues? Are you giving away too much, too little, or just enough? Are you prompting the audience to ask all the right questions without being obtuse?
Are Your Stakes Clear and Important?
… or does the success/failure of your protagonist not really matter? Have objectively small stakes (like $20,000 in Taylor Sheridan’s Hell Or High Water) been amplified to feel like a matter of life and death? On the other end of the spectrum, do your stakes feel overblown or cartoonish? How will you personalise them? And are the stakes for the supporting characters as clearly defined as for the protagonist?
Is Your Story Believable?
… or do you quickly break the parameters of story logic that you established in the first act? Do you rely on a far-fetched deus ex machina to get your protagonist out of a hole? Would those two characters really end up falling in love? Have you set up a clear chain of cause and effect for your story beats? Even if writing fantasy or sci-fi, does your reader understand the limitations of your characters’ abilities?
Is Your Subject Exciting?
… or are you barking up the wrong tree by dramatising a story with no inherent audience appeal? Is this the kind of story that would hold your friends’ attention at a pub, or does it only appeal to you? Has everyone heard this story/biography before? If so, what’s your unique point of access to the subject? Have you made sure that the setting of your script feels unique? How about the characters within it – do they feel authentic, flawed, three-dimensional?
Does Your Dialogue Grab Attention?
… or are you writing flat, overlong speeches that don’t advance the story? On a basic level, does the dialogue reflect the way that people actually talk? How do foreign accents and attitudes affect a character’s speech? Can you sex up your dialogue with slang, dialect or swearing? Do you lean towards telling, rather than showing? Do you trust yourself enough to communicate key meanings in subtext, not dialogue?
Is Your Script Well Executed?
… or does a strong premise lose its way due to lagging pace and a meandering plot? Do all your scenes advance the plot, or is your story dogged by false-start plot beats? Could your reader accurately identify your act breaks into II and III? Is your scene length varied? Do you have two-inch scenes? How about your transitions – do they create meaning, humour or irony in the space between the shots? Have you started your scenes late, and ended them early? Is the screenplay faultlessly formatted? Really, are you sure about that? How about spelling and grammar – has an outside reader given your draft a proofread? Have you asked a professional third-party for an opinion that isn’t your mother’s?
Ouch. Quite the shake-down.
But still, no apologies from us. As Captain Bailey says in Mass Effect 2, ‘You’re not going to get anything if you just ask. You gotta make them scream a little.’
The questions on this checklist sound simple, but we know how impossibly difficult it can feel to put them into action in your screenplay. In fact, they’re so tough to include that if you earnestly answered ‘yes’ to all the questions above, then your script is likely to reach at least the quarter-final stage of any script competition. That’s how many people fall short. Take it from our collective of readers who’ve read for many script competitions between them.
We’ll leave you with a quotation from filmmaker Alexander MacKendrick who, as a renowned direct and former dean of the California Institute of Arts, has worked on more than his fair share of outstanding scripts, and read more than his fair share of bad ones:
‘Screenplays are not written, they are REWRITTEN and REWRITTEN and REWRITTEN.’
Keep writing, and in the meantime we’re off to replenish our significantly depleted supply of question marks. Good luck all!
Sebastian Cox and Felix von Stumm are the co-founders of the script consultancy ScriptUp. In its first year, ScriptUp helped over 200 writers improve their screenplays through detailed notes and development feedback. Sebastian and Felix serve as judges for the ‘Best Unproduced Screenplay’ award in the British Independent Film Festival and the British Animation Film Festival. Felix also reads for the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Competition. Sebastian and Felix are affiliate members of the Writers Guild of Great Britain.
