What I learned from American screenplay competitions

Mikael Durand (Film student 2020-2024) dares to reach for the ultimate screenwriting prize, as he writes in his blog entry about his experiences at the Nicholl Fellowships:

Screenwriting is a craft, and like with any other craft, you can’t get good without practice. However, it is hard to find the motivation to spend hundreds of hours to write a screenplay of 120 pages just for the sake of practice. For me, the solution to this problem was American screenwriting competitions, especially Academy Nicholl Fellowships; the same organization that announces the Oscars. The competition is by far the most important and the biggest in the scene. As such, the competition is tough. In 2021 there were 8,191 participants from 89 different countries. This was my third year and third screenplay in competition, and I managed to climb all the way to the semi-finals which only included the top 150 (1.8%) screenplays. In this blog, I will briefly explain what I have learned from participating in these competitions for three years.

Screenwriting as a profession has achieved almost a mythological status in America. The Writers Guild of America West, for example, reminds its new members that people have a higher chance of getting drafted to Major League Baseball than being accepted into the guild. Because of this status, upcoming screenwriters are constantly looking for new ways to get their screenplays read by Hollywood big shots and breaking into the industry. Screenwriting competitions have been one of these paths into the scene for many years, especially for those people who do not already have important connections. Most of these competitions are either scams or bordering on being scams, but there are a few important ones that may help you with your career. Academy Nicholl Fellowship is the most important one – even placing in the quarter-finals (top 5%) almost guarantees you some attention and reads from producers and agents. Naturally, there is also a nice cash prize for the winners, but the main prize for the contestants is the attention and the reads from professionals. Getting your screenplay read by a producer or an agent might sound strange in the Finnish context, but in America the supply of upcoming screenwriters is so large that almost all screenplays by unknown writers will end up in the trash can without ever getting a single read.

I must admit that I had very high hopes and goals for my first feature length screenplay back in 2018. I toyed with the idea that this would be my ticket into Hollywood, and soon I would be preaching Coppola and Scorsese about the wonders of sauna and sisu. This unrealistic dream became much more important to me than the story I created and the writing itself. Well, as you might have guessed, things didn’t go as well as I had hoped. With my first screenplay, I placed into the top 15–20% in Austin Film Festival. A good start, sure, but hardly useful when it comes to your career. Of course, this result didn’t feel very encouraging for myself as a naïve daydreaming rookie screenwriter, but after a few weeks of apathy I was already planning a new story with new energy and a new attitude. I had learned that if I wanted to become a screenwriter, I had to love my stories and the process instead of using them as tools for achieving some unrealistic pipe dream. I started to write more boldly, and I achieved a completely new kind of self-confidence with my writing and stories. For example, I no longer wondered if my stories sounded interesting for American readers. Although I no longer wrote solely for the sake of the competitions, I kept on participating.

Ironically, I got my best competition placement after I had quit writing for the sole purpose of winning competitions. My latest and most successful screenplay is about Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin. There have been no movies about her despite her life being full of interesting events and people. Her life is also a perfect setup for a generic American agent thriller, because she defected to the West and caused quite a diplomatic crisis between the Soviet Union and USA. Past-me would, without a doubt, have written about this incident and told a very generic story – that is, a story that anyone could write. Now, however, I had gained the confidence to tell Svetlana’s story the way I saw it after spending hundreds of hours of researching her life, Stalin, and the Soviet Union. Her childhood especially fascinated me, and I realized how great a story it truly was. I wanted to tell the story of a child leading a normal life in an authoritarian state; a story of a child who sees Stalin as a father, instead of a monster; a story of a child growing up and slowly realizing the true state of her world and the family she grew up in. This was a very bold and original approach to the subject. Instead of trying to please the reader, I just told the story the best way I could. This approach paid off and scored me my best placement. The only piece of advice I can offer you other passionate writers out there is to really trust your story and to tell it your way. Don’t write something you think other people will like.

Originally, I thought that if I advanced to the quarter-finals of Nicholl, I would be the happiest person alive. Well, I did, and I was, but it didn’t last long. Almost immediately after placing in the quarter-finals I started to think about the semi-finals and how fantastic it would be to get that far. Then I got into the semi-finals, and I started thinking about winning. Well, I did not win, which, of course, was a huge letdown for me. In the end, I realized I probably would have figured out a way to be disappointed even if I had won. This career path is full of disappointments, especially if you have a certain type of personality. However, the disappointments shouldn’t lead to apathy and depression; instead, they should be a driving factor to push you to the next and better story. In the end, you have to remember that screenplay competitions and their results are only a waypoint, not the end-goal itself. They are just one of many ways to get your story to the big screen. You also have to remember that all screenplay evaluations are highly subjective. The best example of this is Michael Arndt. He wrote this funny little story called Little Miss Sunshine which got rejected in the first round of Nicholl Fellowship. That same screenplay would later win an Oscar for best original screenplay. This is a prime example of the point I made earlier: it is impossible to write something that you think readers will like. Your best bet is to write a story that you find worth telling and telling that story the best way you can.