The Consciously Compentent Writer: When to enter your first screenwriting contest
Most screenwriting contests have four rounds: First Round, Second Round, Semi-finalist and Finalist. Judges for these contests are called readers. When you read for a contest, you’re told not be surprised if you only pass forward about 20% of the scripts from the first round. THE FIRST ROUND. This means that about 80 percent of writers who enter contests submit scripts that may not be ready.
The Consciously Competent model of learning is easily found on the Internet, but is not credited. It divides learning into four quadrants:
For writers I see it this way:
Competence |
Incompetence | |
Conscious |
3. The writer works hard and spends time identifying the script’s problems and learning from the experts how to resolve them. |
2. The writer enters a contest not sure that the script is good enough, but willing to see how it will do. |
Unconscious |
4. The writer practices until going through all the steps of the process is as easy as riding a bike or playing the guitar (which you also had to learn.) |
1. The writer enters contests thinking that popping a script was easy. What’s the big deal? The writer doesn’t know that his/her writing is deficient in some manner. |
Everyone starts out in Quad 1. The way that a writer progresses from Quad 1 to Quad 2 is awareness. It may come like an epiphany. You begin to recognize all the screenplay’s problem areas. Now you can ‘see’ – especially in other people’s scripts. With yours, if you concentrate real hard and squint your eyes, you can still convince yourself that the work is competent when you know deep down that it is not.
Anyone can put words on 120 correctly-formatted pages. Nobody can teach you talent. But you can learn craft. Craft isn’t hard to find. It’s everywhere in books, classes, writing workshops and seminars. The experts basically say the same things. The way to move from Quad 2 to Quad 3 is take what you “see,” learn to “listen” to what you hear and apply that to fixing the problems. It’s the hard work.
The way to move from Quad 3 to Quad 4 is to practice, practice, practice.
The answer to the question: when should you enter your first screenwriting contest? – when you see with certainty what’s good and what’s not; when you know with certainty that you're on the left side of the conscious competent model.
Nancy Smith is a writer and script analyst who lives on the “third coast,” Austin, Texas.