What a stupid contest

Fiction and blog writers have their month, and recently so do screenwriters. Write a script in a month. Great incentive.

Unfortunately, check out rule number one:

The 5 Basic Rules of Script Frenzy: 1) To be crowned an official Script Frenzy winner, you must write a script of at least 20,000 words and verify this word count on ScriptFrenzy.org.

Only very early in my career, before I understood the marketplace and the poetic economy of the screenplay, did I ever write a script this verbose! The entire evolution of the form has been toward narrative economy. The script my agent currently is marketing, for example, comes in at under 14,000 words. For a contest, I'd say 10,000 words, or better yet, at least 90 correctly formatted pages. This is the only screenwriting contest I ever have heard of that uses words and not page counts! It also is the only contest without a maximum size. (Most contests are 90-120 pages).

All this contest does in encourage bad habits for which the beginning screenwriter will pay dearly in the marketplace. I told the organizers of this contest this a year or two ago but never received an answer. I have no idea why they encourage such verbose writing. I've been a judge in screenwriting contests myself, and verbosity is one of the major screenwriting sins in the scripts I read. With regard to rhetoric, most beginning screenwriters write like fiction writers, not professional screenwriters. A contest like this encourages this mistake, it seems to me.

To be sure, you'll find professionally written shooting scripts that are 20,000 words or more but these are not spec scripts, which are what beginning screenwriters write -- and the reading environments are hugely different for the two forms of screenplays.

Shooting scripts are an investment -- that is, the screenwriter has been paid something before writing (in the professional environment). This gives considerable rhetorical freedom to the writer! There is no competition going on, the sale happens before writing the script. The writer does not have to compete for a reader's attention -- if I pay you a fifty grand advance, damn right I'm going to pay attention to what you write, even if it's on toilet paper!

But the beginning screenwriter, with a spec script, is in competition with many, many other scripts piled upon the reader's desk -- and this reader gets paid by the script, not by the hour! The reader's job is to fill out a coverage form. This means, the reader wants a quick, easy read. No unnecessary verbosity. (I've been a reader: I could reject scripts for text density alone on a bad day.)

All this said, many professional screenplays still come in at under 20,000 words. CRASH, which won best picture, is a 17,000 word screenplay. So it's not eligible for this stupid contest.

So my advice to my students and all beginning screenwriters, avoid this contest like the plague. If you start writing this verbosely, you will pay dearly in the spec screenplay marketplace.