Category: tips

Hey! It’s contest season again, isn’t it?

Technically it’s always contest season, yeah, but it’s the start of the year and a couple of the big ones are opening their doors for new submissions. So, as I often do at this time of year, I was going to offer a few insights into things that make all those contest readers want to put a gun in their mouth.

Well, that’s probably a bit extreme. There are some really awful scripts out there, but you can rest assured none of them are going to drive a reader to suicide. Murder, maybe, but not suicide.

Now, as I’ve said many times before, none of these mistakes are sure-fire ways to lose. But they’re all things that make readers roll their eyes and reach for the Captain Morgans, which means it just got that much harder to impress those readers. So keep that in mind before you fill out an entry form and maybe give your masterpiece one more good look. I mean, really look at it

Spelling — Yeah, I’m harping on this again. There’ll probably be a whole post coming up sometime in the near future.

Because it matters, that’s why.

Over the course of a few years I wrote two different contest columns for Creative Screenwriting, interviewed dozens of contest directors, and asked each of them about tips for aspiring entrants. Across the board, the first thing most of them said was spelling and grammar.

Now, a random typo doesn’t mean you blew it. We all make mistakes, and readers know that, too. If they go through and find a their on page 42 when it should be there, they’re going to cluck their tongues but keep reading. If there’s a typo on every page, though… Heck, there were a few screenplays I looked at where I wasn’t even thirty pages in and I’d lost track of how many there were.

Whenever you hand off a manuscript you’re trying to convince the reader that you’re a real writer. Someone who can do more with words than just sign their name, scribble a shopping list, or send a txt mssg (ROFL LOL STFU). The absolute, bare-bones basic tools of writing – any writing– are vocabulary, spelling, and grammar. Which means you need to master them, not your spellchecker. If you establish early on that you can’t handle the basics, why would a reader look any farther?

Apostrophe S — You could argue this goes under spelling, but speaking as someone who’s read a thousand or so scripts by aspiring screenwriters, I can say it’s in a class by itself. Messing up an apostrophe S stands out like a flare to anyone who knows how to use it. As I said above, we all make mistakes now and then, but it’s painfully obvious when a writer’s just throwing down random apostrophes and getting a few right by sheer chance.

Knowing the difference between a plural, a possessive, and a contraction is past basic—it’s a fundamental part of the English language. Stop writing, go get a grammar book–even a fun one like Eats Shoots & Leaves (look at the carousel down below)–and actually read it. Promise yourself that as of this moment there will be no more guessing or wild stabs in the dark.

Logic holes — A friend of mine called me once, laughing in hysterics. He was reading for a contest and was halfway through a sci-fi script where human colonists were struggling with the affects of a war that had taken place 200 years earlier. The enemy had released a bio-weapon that wiped out pre-pubescents, so every generation of colonists had lost all their children for the past two centuries.

Give it a second. You’ll start laughing, too.

You’ve probably heard of “movie logic,” a term which also applies to television and even prose. It’s when the writer bends the laws of common sense to solve an issue or a problem. As long as you don’t look at it too close, movie logic can usually get skimmed over and carry you to the next scene or paragraph.

The flipside of this is a complete lack of logic, which makes readers call their friends to share the joke. A lack of logic knocks the reader out of the story, which means it breaks the flow of the story. And that gets scripts put in the big pile on the left.

Fortune Cookie Talk — Also sometimes called Confucius-speak by another friend of mine. This is when a screenwriter tries to cut down their page count by cutting all the articles, “small” words, and transitional bits from their script. I think there’s also a misguided belief that this gives their writing more “punch.”

Neo walks streets. Man pulls gun. Neo dodges. Drives kick into man’s chest. Man out cold. Neo is One.

Trust me, there are only two things this leads to. One is annoyance as the story slowly edges into unreadable. Two is laughter. Not the good kind of laughter. The “all the kids die every generation for 200 years” kind of laughter.

The Squashed Script — Sometimes the writer refuses to make any more cuts (for conscious reasons or sheer denial) and ends up with a 170-or-so page script. So they change the font size or the margins or the line spacing and crush the script down into an acceptable number of pages. After all, going from 12 to 9 point Courier can shrink a 170 page script down to 130 pages. That’s a fine length for a script, right?

This is annoying on a bunch of levels. First and foremost, if any writer is manipulating their script like this, it means they know their script is unacceptably long and they’re making no real effort to fix the problem. Second, it shows that the writer is assuming the readers won’t realize what’s going on (and why), which is kind of arrogant if you think about it.

Believe me, readers love arrogant writers who assume they’re idiots. It makes the job soooo much easier.

(not in a good way, in case the sarcasm wasn’t showing…)

Reality is What You Make It — More often than not, either the title or final page of this screenplay assures the reader that this tale is, in fact, based on the true accounts of me/ my best friend/ my brother/ my parents/ my grandparents/ someone I read about in a magazine article. These are tales of cancer, disease, genocide, military struggles, marital struggles, crises of faith, and various other conflicts of this world we live in. Alas, sometimes they’re also about struggling writers searching for someone to recognize their genius. Often, the fact this is all true is stressed to give a certain validity and gravitas to the screenplay.

Thing is, it doesn’t matter if the story is true or not. Nobody cares. They just care if it’s a good story and it’s well-told. And in that respect, a tale of an orphaned cancer survivor in Rwanda needs to stand up against the story of a black-ops secret agent who teams up with prehistoric lizard men from Atlantis to save the world from a zombie apocalypse. Whether or not its true is irrelevant. In the end, you’re telling a story, and it’s either going to have its own validity or it isn’t. Reality just doesn’t enter into the equation for the reader, so it can’t for the writer.

Frankenanite — A large percentage of genre scripts involve nanites which somehow go rogue and endanger mankind. Don’t know what a nanite is? No problem–a couple of these writers don’t either. If you’re writing a genre screenplay about nanites (or something indistinguishable from nanites like genetically-altered bacteria or something) think carefully. If I had to pick the ten most overused plot devices, these little guys would be in the top three.

Epic — Avoid the word epic. The only time the word epic should appear in your script is if someone in the script is telling a very overblown story. It’s a word for critics, publicists, and producers. Screenwriters can use it in interviews, but not in their writing.

Orbs — No orbs. You would not believe how much this word is overused. People throw it in everywhere because they think it’s better than pedestrian words like round or sphere. Much like mellonballer is guaranteed to get you a Nicholl Fellowship, using the word orb to describe eyes, mystical stones, the sun, or pretty much anything else will make the reader shake their head and pour themselves a second drink. Then they will pour a third drink onto your script and set fire to it.

To Be Continued — You get one script to impress someone with. One. Nobody wins anything with the first of an epic trilogy (see above). That one manuscript has to stand on its own. Ending a screenplay – especially a contest entry screenplay- with “to be continued” hammers home the fact that this is an incomplete tale. It tells the reader you had no idea how to end this story in 120 pages.

Remember, The Matrix, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Highlander were not written as trilogies. Despite everything you may have heard, neither was Star Wars. Every one of these films was conceived of, written, and shot as a lone entity. They had to stand alone and succeed alone. If they had to do it that way, don’t think for a minute that your story won’t have to.

And there you have it. Ten ways you can make a reader sigh and shake their head in disdain. Which really means this is ten ways you can avoid getting the head shake, and that means your manuscript is that much closer to dodging the big pile on the left and ending up in the right pile.

Next time… well, I’m not sure what I’m going to rant about next time. But there will be a point to it, I assure you.

Until then, go write.

This week’s rant is a bit screenwriter-centric, but it really applies to any sort of submission anywhere. The following words are going to be a bit harsh (even for me), so if you’ve got thin skin… well, next week I was going to talk about characters a bit. If you’re quick to offend, maybe you should just go check out John August’s blog for now and come back here next week.

So, last night I was at the Nicholl Fellowship dinner to see the five new folks get awarded their fellowships. I couldn’t help but notice a lot of you weren’t there. In fact, lets be honest… most of you reading this weren’t there. I’d even be willing to bet a few bucks none of you were there.

Granted, I’m betting not all of you entered the Nicholl this year, but I’m pretty sure a couple of you did. And you weren’t there last night, were you?

A shame really. The steak was fantastic. I mean, seriously, it was amazing. Three of the best meals I’ve ever had have been at Nicholl dinners.

But I digress…

First off, let’s get one thing straight. Nobody deserves to win a contest. Just because all your friends won doesn’t mean you get to as well. It’s never your turn, it’s never about time, and luck has very, very little to do with it. We’re not talking about statistics. A screenplay contest (or any writing submission) is not a lottery.

With that being said, the ugly truth is, most of you reading this don’t deserve to win a contest anyway. Especially not one as prestigious as the Nicholl. That’s all there is to it. You can argue all you like but that’s the way it is.

Let me explain.

For the sake of this discussion, let’s say I’ve decided to hold a contest for horror screenplays. One grand prize, with four lesser prizes. Everyone who subscribes to the ranty blog enters, and let’s say some folks past that, too. By fortunate coincidence, I end up with 100 entries.

Let’s look at those 100 scripts (or short stories, or novels, or whatever it is sitting in a big pile in front of me).

Well, first off, there’s the 50% rule. Out of these 100 screenplays, odds are half of them are going to go right out the window. Figure some people submitted comedies or dramas that features zombies, but they figured it wouldn’t hurt to try. Some of them probably didn’t even have a horror element–they were just straight romcoms or fantasy or sci-fi. I’ll probably recognize their genius and give them an award anyway, though, won’t I?

Plus a few of them will be short stories, not screenplays, and probably a few that are in stage play format, too. One or two will be novels that were very poorly converted into a screenplay template (I mean, it’s all essentially the same thing, right?).

And some will just be God-awful. No other way to say it. Twenty blatant typos on page one. Characters so flat they could slide under a door. Dialogue that makes it sound like English is everyone’s second (or third) language. A plot that sounds a lot like a five year old explaining where dinosaurs came from.

So right there, 50% gone from my horror screenplay contest with almost no effort on my part. Maybe as few as 40. Perhaps as many as 60. In my experience, though, 50% is a great rule of thumb.

The next level of cuts will be those scripts that just don’t measure up. They’ve got an interesting premise, maybe a very clever take on an old idea, but they just didn’t do enough with it. Maybe the writer didn’t work on the screenplay enough because they took the lottery mentality and tried to enter four or five scripts that all could’ve used another two or three drafts. Or maybe it was just one script and it really just needed one more polish.

True story. A few years back I entered a contest that kept their own message boards up so people could talk. One guy proudly stated on these boards that he’d entered over a dozen screenplays. He also directed people to his website, where he had loglines for the three dozen or so scripts he’d written in the past two or three years. When none of his scripts placed, it was all the proof he needed that this contest was obviously a scam.

(I came in third. Got a free copy of Final Draft and a nice certificate.)

If this is the first draft of your script, it’s not going to win a contest. A lot of you may argue that there’s always a chance, I shouldn’t be negative, you may be a truly gifted amateur, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda. This is true. It’s also true, by every known law of physics, that random atoms in the air could come together in just the right way as to form an ounce of pure gold that drops right into your lap. True, and statistically possible, but the odds of it happening are so insanely, ridiculously low that you might as well say it’s impossible.

Please note, this doesn’t mean the script is bad or the writing is inherently flawed. It just means it isn’t polished enough. Despite what you may believe, there are actually tons of diamonds in the world. Literally, tons of them. They’re not all gem-quality, though, and not all of the ones that are get cut and polished correctly. That’s why engagement rings cost half a year’s pay.

So, that kills almost 2/3 of the scripts that are left. They’re good, but they aren’t great. Now we’re down to seventeen entries (rounding up, because I’m feeling generous).

Next is the rough one. It’s the human factor, and it pervades every single level of the judging process to a small degree. Readers are human beings doing a job. They have good days and bad days. They can get distracted or they can focus on the wrong thing. Think of your day job– are you 100% focused on it every minute you’re there? Or does your mind wander to your holiday shopping, your personal life, wondering about the cute temp’s personal life, wondering if your boss is that clueless or that brilliant…?

Well, readers do the same things. And, alas, they do it while reading your script.

There’s plusses and minuses to this. On the downside, your sci-fi romance screenplay might land on John’s desktop. John hates sci-fi and he just found out Phoebe’s dumping him for someone else. So today, well… today it might be a little tough for him to be impartial. You’re probably going to lose a point or three from him, and those points are crucial.

Or it might land on Wakko’s desk. Wakko loves sci-fi. Lives and breathes it. He’s got an Enterprise telephone and a TARDIS cell phone charm. Plus, he had his third date with Phoebe last night and… well, the third date went very, very well. So he’s thrilled to get your script and he’s almost definitely going to pass it on to the next level, even if maybe it doesn’t really deserve to make the cut..

Then again, it could go to Dot. She’s okay with some sci-fi, doesn’t mind it, but your script will get a fair shake with her. But little indy character dramas with no plot? Man, she loathes those things…

Maybe you’ll luck out. Maybe you won’t. Alas, statistically, the human factor is more likely to hurt than help. Y’see, Timmy, a good script that gets shot down stays shot down. A so-so script that doesn’t get shot down now most likely will get shot down later and then stay shot down. So if the human factor has a permanent effect, it’ll be a bad one.

At the most though, as I said, we’re only going to lose a few scripts to this. Let’s say three.

Now we’re down to fourteen out of the original hundred. See how quick they go away?

Last but not least…not everyone wins. When it comes down to it, contests have only so many slots for winners, and they can’t hand out prizes to every script that may deserve them. I’m giving away five prizes. That’s it. You can write a spectacular script and still come in second. Or even eighth.

That’s not just math, it’s life.

Keep in mind, while not winning is heartbreaking, it doesn’t have to be the end. Many contests offer feedback and judges’ comments on entries, so losing can still get you valuable information about how your script was perceived. You can use these responses to hone and polish your script even further, so the next time it goes out it will be stronger than ever.

It’s also worth noting that several producers, agents, and managers who keep track of contests look at the semi-finalists and finalists with just as much interest as the actual winners. James V. Simpson was a finalist for the 2006 Nicholl Fellowship. He didn’t get the fellowship, but his screenplay, Armored, still ended up selling for almost half a million dollars and got released earlier this year with a star-studded cast.

You will not win every contest, but–as special-snowflake as it sounds– you can try to make every one a positive experience.

Next time around, I want to talk about character. Because good characters rule.

Until then go write. And don’t get discouraged just because you didn’t win this time.

I would like to thank Admiral Ackbar for pointing out the obvious.

Alas, sometimes things aren’t as apparent as we think they should be. Like the horror story where the absolute last thing someone should do is open the door to the study, so of course Yakko is reaching for the knob…

Lots of aspiring writers fall into traps. Sometimes it happens when they follow bad advice. Other times it’s because they insist on using a method or writing in a style which really doesn’t work for them. And sometimes… sometimes that trap’s just sitting there in the field kids play kickball in, hidden by some leaves, waiting to snap…

So, with all that being said, here are some common–and dangerous– misconceptions people have about writing. Beware them, and beware the people who set these traps for themselves and others.

Writing is easy – Probably the most common misconception there is. I mean, most of us learned how to put words on paper when we were ten, right? We could write passable essays by ninth grade. So writing for a living, for an audience greater than your immediate friends and loved ones, how hard could it be? Anyone can do it once you’ve got a clever idea. Heck, I’d bet 90% of Americans have immediate access to a word processor of some sort.

Truth is, writing—not basic, grade-school literacy, mind you, but the ability to write— is a skill which needs to be learned like any other. All you need to do is browse the comment sections of any news feed or message board to see how few people know how to express their ideas through words. Yeah, I took English and reading classes in school. I also took music classes, so maybe I should expect to get a recording contract sometime soon? Twelve years of gym classes, too, but for some reason I haven’t made it onto any Olympic teams.

Writers need to train and practice for months–maybe even years–before they’re ready to show off their writing. I don’t need to look it up to tell you Wolfgang Puck didn’t get any praise for the first hundred meals he cooked, Mark McGuire did not get paid big money the first thousand times he swung a baseball bat, and Stephen King didn’t make a single cent off the first 100,000 words he wrote. Writing is work. Hard work. It requires skill, a great deal of practice, some actual talent, and a heck of a lot of dedication. This is why so many people can’t succeed at it.

This is probably the best trap because it doesn’t just catch the writer, it tends to kill them 2/3 of the time. Most of the wanna-be writers who believe this have never actually written anything. Once they do, they come up with an excuse why they’ll never be completing their manuscript (see below), then slink away to become musicians. Or writing gurus.

Writing doesn’t require any writing – A few decades back there was a huge spec script boom in Hollywood. It was one of those rare periods when studios acknowledged the importance of the writer and were paying top dollar for screenplays, or even just the idea for one. A popular story is how established screenwriter Joe Eszterhas scribbled the bare idea (no pun intended) for Jade on a cocktail napkin and ended up with a multi-million dollar contract for it.

As I said, however, this was over twenty years ago. These days producers and publishers are much more cautious and they’re not interested in ideas. They’re interested in complete, finished works. Not two-thirds of a manuscript. Not most of a script. Just to save time, knowing the right people won’t change this. No, it won’t. I don’t care what you read on the special snowflake website.

Not to sound too harsh but… well, no, this is harsh because people can only end up in this trap by choice. If someone can’t write and complete something, they can’t be a writer. That’s really all there is to it. Stop now and go back to those criminal justice classes you signed up for.

For the record, some folks argue they don’t want to write until they get paid. These people should give up on any sort of fiction– because that’s not going to happen there–and go into journalism. Then they need to find a staff job on a website, magazine, or newspaper.

Good luck with that, by the way, not having a writing resume and all…

First person is easy – A lot of prose writers start off with first person stories. It’s quick, it’s not hard to get into, it’s easy to find a voice. It’s also very personable, so a reader can relate to the characters immediately. Plus there are tons of formats ready and waiting; journals, diaries, letter, memoirs, and so on.

Truth is, first person is a very difficult, very limiting tense to write in. There’s a reason so many professional writers avoid it. Beginning writers rarely develop their first-person characters past their voice. I could go on about this one for a while, and as it happens I did earlier this year.

Writers who get caught in this trap start their first novel and pound out 20,000 words worth of journal entries over the weekend. There’s always that chance they may be brimming with so much raw talent they’re the next Hemingway or Steinbeck. There’s a far better chance, though, they’ve just wasted a long weekend.

Writers don’t need to read – Somewhere along the line, someone started promoting the silly idea writers shouldn’t waste time reading, they should spend all their time writing. This is kind of like saying you don’t want to waste time stopping for gas while you’re driving. Every professional writer I’ve ever met, interviewed, or even just read about (myself included) reads voraciously. A writer should be devouring works in their chosen field to stay current and snacking heavily on everything else to stay fresh.

Sad but true, the people who fall into this trap tend to write plain awful stuff. They go for every easy idea, hit every cliché plot point, and tend to follow the textbook formulas they were taught in some creative writing class somewhere. What else can they do? They try to mimic one or two famous examples of what they aspire to and usually end up looking just like the worst of the worst (because they have no idea what the worst looks like)

Research everything – Alas, this is one of the two deadliest traps out there, which is why I saved it for one of the last. We all want to get the facts right in our stories. We check research books, make phone calls, visit important locations, or maybe some of us just spend a lot of time on Wikipedia. The point is, how can I be expected to move forward with my story if I don’t know the name of George Washington’s barber and what size shirt he wore? It’ll ruin everything if I just call him John Smith, neck 16.

This is an awful trap because getting stuck in it means a writer was trying to do the right thing. Research is important, but never forget it’s not writing. There’s a time for putting noses in books but there’s also a time for putting pens to paper (or binary code to electromagnetic bubble memory, as it may be)

Some people get caught in an even deeper layer of this trap. They get stuck researching how to write. We’ve all known someone like this, the one who buys book after book, takes class after class, but never does any actual writing. For some people this becomes a defense mechanism of sorts, sometimes subconsciously and sometimes… not so subconsciously. If they never start, they won’t have to put the work in and their work stays in that wonderful hypothetical stage where it’s the greatest thing (almost) ever committed to paper. It’s a tragedy, really, they never had time to write it down…

Rewrite until it’s perfect – The last and deadliest of the traps in our showroom. For some people, rewriting turns into an endless loop. There’s always another opinion to listen to, more feedback to get, and revisions which need to be done because of them. Just thought of a new way to do those action scenes? That calls for another draft. Maybe last night’s Chuck inspired a new opening? Perhaps Aunt Betty is visiting and she thought the ending was a little violent, and a good writer knows changing the end means changing everything which leads up to the end.

There are two ways people fall into this trap. One is a combination of bad advice and bad judgment. So many gurus tell people to rewrite and rewrite and rewrite. How many times have you heard “writing is rewriting” parroted in classes or on message boards? There’s some truth to that, but there’s also a lot of truth in the phrase “poop or get off the pot” (cleaned up for work computers). Eventually, a writer just needs to call it done and move on or they’re going to be trapped in one manuscript forever.

The other way people fall into this trap is by purpose. A bit like with research, constant rewrites are an excuse not to actually produce anything. You don’t expect me to show you an incomplete or old draft, do you? I was going to send it to some agents or publishers, but I think it needs one more polish to make it perfect. Maybe one more after I go through and clean up a few loose threads. Rewrites are a way wanna-be writers–again, consciously or not– can avoid possible failure yet still keep up the illusion of forward motion.

Are all of these traps deadly? No, but getting snagged in one can definitely cost you some time. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t fallen victim to one or three of them over the years. Fortunately, one of those things only has to slam on your leg once and you’ll rarely let it happen again.

Assuming, of course, that you get out of it the first time.

Next time, I’m going to throw around some big words relating to the throwing about of big words.

Until then, go write. And watch your step.