This felt almost incredible. In late January of last year, I had entered my script for Dig Down into three screenplay competitions, and in just over a month, and in about the span of one week, I had gotten my notes on all of them.
I was still coming off of the high of how great my first ever consultation had gone for my script, and yes, I still felt elated, even after the notes I had gotten from the Santa Barbara Screenplay Competition. Writing this story was still a journey, even though I had already published it four years ago, because I had taken up adapting it into a new medium, and I felt it was important to recognize the high points along that journey.
But not to dwell on them.
Tomorrow I would need to get back to work. And from the notes I had gotten from the three competitions, I had my work cut out for me. Yes, the notes had been positive. Even the Santa Barbara feedback had still scored my script a 79. I did feel it could be higher, but I also recognized there was room for improvement, and there definitely were critiques that I agreed with.
The thing to do now was to take stock of all that feedback. My purpose for entering multiple contests was to get a collective, objective opinion on it – both good and bad – to narrow down what worked and what didn’t. If I entered just one, I risked making revisions based on the whims and preferences of one judge. But with multiple sets and sources of notes, I could hone in on the similarities, prioritize those, and then take on the remarks and comments that only appeared in one set of feedback based on how I felt they would impact the story.
I also had to be cognizant of the deadlines that the three competitions had. While they were running concurrently, they each had their own final submission dates. Both Page Turner and Santa Barbara had only a few weeks remaining – for Page Turner I only had 17 days left to submit a revised draft – but I still had a month with Finish Line.
I decided to prioritize Page Turner, both because I had gone the extra step and had a phone consultation to cover my script, and because there was a lot of overlap between the feedback from them and Finish Line, and I felt addressing Page Turner would also cover a large part of the revisions for Finish Line.
It was Santa Barbara that I chose to forego. There deadline was a little after Page Turner, and while some of their feedback was similar, I felt it raised points and areas of improvement that didn’t mesh with the other two contests, and given the timeframe I had to work within, I didn’t think I could make revisions that took the script in two different directions – it wasn’t exactly like creating two completely different versions, but it would be tailoring two different drafts of the same story to submit to two different contests – wasn’t the best use of my time.
I was essentially opting to sacrifice the results of one contest to improve my chances with the other two.
With a gameplan in place to work on my revisions, the next thing to do would be to prioritize the feedback to address. And as my head hit the pillow for the night, I resolved that the following morning, I would start to analyze my script.