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I was thrilled when I saw that my screenplay for “Lock the Doors” was selected as a finalist in the 13Horror competition. I had just traveled to Arizona to spend time with my cousins, and this was a great way to kick off the vacation.

I…also didn’t know what placing as a finalist meant.

I had taken that to mean that I had successfully advanced through the first round of judging, and would be considered among the other finalists for the grand prize. But as much as I read and re-read through an admittedly short email, I couldn’t find any indication of when they would announce the winners. I had an attachment of a digital laurel for my achievement, a pitch to buy a physical copy of my script, as well as some other offers to help promote my screenplay.

I will admit I read and analyzed this (again) short email, and even read through their website for a couple of hours before putting it together, which is much longer than it should have taken. I had been waiting for this email on this particular day because this was when the contest was announcing its winner. It just took me a little longer to piece together that I hadn’t.

In screenwriting competitions, they will typically announce the winner, maybe even a second and third place, and then the finalists. If a screenplay competition is big enough, it will also list some honorable mentions. What I didn’t realize at the time but understand now is that when you place as a finalist, that is your final placement. You did well, just not well enough to win.

I honestly wasn’t disappointed in the result, and any frustration was over how long it took me to figure this out on my own. I was thrilled! I had entered “Lock the Doors” just looking for feedback, and the response I got was that this was one of the best screenplays entered into a competition designed for its genre.

I’ll go into the results of the other screenplay contests I had entered, next time.

I remember that the contest results were going to be announced on July 31 of last year.

At that time, I was going to be on vacation in Arizona. My cousin was going to be featured in an art show in downtown Phoenix that Friday. Because the results were going to be announced at the beginning of my trip, I took this as a good sign for both of us.

I quietly scrolled through my emails every hour. The time difference may have thrown me off a little in terms of how late the announcement may have been made.

I perked up when I saw the email in my inbox. All I ever had to go on was one email from Scriptapalooza years ago that my submission had not been selected.

That wasn’t the case this time.

I was informed that I had placed as a finalist!

This was truly amazing to me. While I am competitive and like to win, my main goal for submitting my screenplay for Lock the Doors was just to get feedback on a writing style I wasn’t all too familiar with. For that to lead to placing as a finalist in the first competition I entered was just incredible.

And to share it with family was a great experience as well. Since we were all on vacation, we had been drinking, but this announcement finally got them to acquiesce to the hard stuff in celebration.

I had submitted Lock the Doors to the 13Horror.com Screenplay Contest on June 26th last year. It was on the last day of my vacation, time off I had taken with the intent to stay home and focus on the types of projects I wanted to work on in life, if I had complete freedom and didn’t have to work a job.

Writing was a focus during that week, and most of what I did was outline a new story idea (one I hope to publish in the future, it just got much bigger than I expected). As the week went on, I thought about how I had a completed (ha!) script from earlier in the year and how I wasn’t doing anything with it ever since I’d finished (ha!) writing it.

It felt pretty good to cap off what I felt was a productive, and also refreshing, week to myself, although part of me also wished I’d thought to do this sooner. I felt I could’ve made more use out of developing my Lock the Doors screenplay.

So, after a week returning to the normal life of work, and wanting to chase the feeling I’d gotten from my week dedicated to living the life I wanted, I set out to rectify that. I started looking up more screenplay contests to enter, trying to find ones that focused on horror. I found one called HorrOrigins, which I entered on July 14th.

I also entered another contest on the 14th, and to be honest, I’m not sure what made me so bold to do so. I don’t think horror fares well against all the other genres, especially in a screenplay competition, and while I definitely know the reason I entered was because I thought the concept might carry the script for in the contest, it would still be two more days before I would get the initial feedback from 13Horror, so I still would’ve had no idea where I stood as a screenwriter.

That contest was the Toronto International Film Festival.

Despite Lock the Doors not really being a good fit on the surface, I was really pleased with myself. Not only was I still entering contests to judge the strength of my screenwriting, something I had little experience with, but I also wasn’t letting time slip away like I had done during my week off by finding more contests almost right away. In doing so, I was following through on the momentum of putting my work out there, a habit that I still need to form.

I was also entering it with the big boys.

More to come, next week.

I remember when I saw the email from the 13Horror screenplay competition with notes on my script for Lock the Doors. I was scrolling through my emails on the weekend when I saw the message waiting for me, and my first thought was ‘I don’t like where I am, this isn’t the place to sit and read an email about the career I want to get into.’

The NEXT thought I had, once I had moved to another room, was ‘These are going to be good notes.’

I’m still not sure where that level of confidence came from. I know that I also had some doubts about how the script was going to be received. It was one of the first scripts I’d ever written (the third overall) and the only other script I had written that anyone else had ever seen had not been selected in the one competition I had entered it into fourteen years prior.

Maybe it was because this had already been worked on, and polished when I was working with my editor on the novella. I knew it had really good pacing (even after all the times I’d read and re-read it while working on it, its the one that surprised me how well it moved the first time I’d read it after I had published it), and maybe that was another reason for my optimism.

Whatever the case, it looked like I was right. I felt the notes were predominantly positive. But there were some areas where the judges felt it could be improved. And only a week to address them and re-submit.

I’ve had deadlines before when working with my editor, and getting the book ready to be published on Amazon. Yet for some reason, this deadline felt different. Maybe it was because, although I was paying them for the entry and the feedback, I wasn’t hiring them the same way I hired my editor, where we were working together to get the best version of the story out there.

And honestly, that terrified me a little.

But the notes were focused on specific things to improve the script. It was what I’d been hoping to achieve by entering the contest in the first place.

My first read through of the script post-feedback was marking down all the times I had directed the action with eye movements. I got such a kick out of it when the judge said my style of writing was more suited for a novel, and I thought it was a credit to how insightful they were. It’s actually been a note I’ve been cognizant of ever since, something I focused on when re-writing Dig Down.

Running through the script a second time, I then focused on replacing all those eye movements with just describing what I wanted the characters to do. I found the story lost nothing, since the screenplay is supposed to describe what will be on the screen, and so there was no point to show a character looking in a direction and then to see what they saw. Just cut out the middle man.

The third run I did through the script looked for those blocks of text and just hacking them down. There were several action blocks that were three and four lines (big no-no), and I worked to shave a line off each of them, at least.

One last run through the script to clean up any spelling and grammar issues I found. It all seems quick as I described it in less than four paragraphs, but by this point, my week was almost up. This was because I had taken a day assessing the notes and feedback and formulating a plan of how I was going to tackle the revisions, and each read through I had done constituted a day so I could reflect on the changes I’d made and how I felt about them.

I ended up re-submitting my script on July 22, a day before the deadline. Now all that was left was to wait for the results, and while the waiting was its own brand of nerve-racking, just like when I first got the email that the feedback was available, I felt good about where I was at with the script, and this time, I actually knew why. I felt I had done everything I could to address the areas identified that needed improvement, and left nothing on the field.

Until next time.

This was the first ever feedback I received on my screenplay for Lock the Doors, and the first feedback I had ever received on a screenplay:

You’ve got a couple of great ideas woven together here – the
effects of not taking the medication and how this creates the
character of The Boy, plus the confusion around the two
identical cabins. It’s darkly comic and a brilliant way to
subvert the idea of home intrusion. It’s also very cleverly
done and you’ve obviously put a lot of thought into how the
circumstantial can be used to create such drama.
There’s something compelling about The Boy’s reasoning and
paranoid but convincing intelligence. It stirs up a mish mash
of Of Mice And Men, the British film Dead Man’s Shoes, Thomas
Tryon’s novel The Other and even Fight Club.
You have some very nicely worked horror set pieces embedded
throughout. My only concern is that on occasion you wander a
little too far into a style of writing more suited to a novel
than to a screenplay. Yes, it’s nice writing and it’s great to
be visual but you need to balance this against the pace and
the flow of the screenplay. Be savvy. Try and find a way to
make the scene direction dynamic. Blocks of prose permeating
each scene can be a slog to get through. Screenplays are not
books; they are meant to mimic the feeling of watching a film.
If something exciting is happening, it should be written in an
exciting way to try to suggest how intense the scene will be
once filmed. There is no hard and fast rule here, but large
chunks of no-frills scene direction are extremely scarce in
professional screenplays.
Consider the number of times you’re referencing what your
characters’ eyes are doing: Eyes lighting up, eyes gleaming,
eyes widening, sweeping, shutting, opening, filling with
murderous fury… things like these feel well overcooked. If
you can address this and tighten things up by focussing on the
germane rather than the superfluous then you’ll turn this from
a good screenplay to a great one.
Great idea which has been for the most part very well
executed.

After putting aside the setback of losing my first draft of the Dig Down script and adapting Lock the Doors into a screenplay, I found myself at an impasse of what to do next. I can almost hear the suggestion: start pitching to studios, or hire an agent. And those were both things I definitely wanted to do.

The problem with going that route is that although I had a completed draft, and one with a few rounds of edits under its belt, I still had no idea where my script stood in terms of being on a professional level. And a pitfall with this industry is that you may only get one chance to pitch your story to a studio or agent. If it doesn’t come across as polished and professional, you might burn through a lot of potential opportunities.

I felt the best course of action was to enter Lock the Doors in some screenwriting competitions. This method wasn’t pitching to get representation or a deal done, it was a way to determine how my screenplay compared, not only to industry standards, but against other hopeful screenwriters.

I opted for the 13Horror.com Film & Screenplay Contest because it also offered feedback and notes on entries, and if I submitted early enough, would have the chance to make revisions based on their notes and recommendations and resubmit. I felt this would be extremely beneficial because not only would I see where I ranked against other entrants, but I would also receive critiques that pinpointed what I did well and what I needed to improve on.

On July 15th of last year, the lead judge got back to me last summer with the much anticipated notes, which I will share in a post later this week. To summarize, there were some good notes, and to be honest, more than I expected. Aside from adapting Dig Down, I had only ever written one other screenplay, another thriller called On the River, and the only feedback I had ever received on that was that it was not selected when I entered it into Scriptapalooza.

In short, even adapted from a story people enjoyed, I’m not a screenwriter, and I do find shifting from an author mindset to that of a screenwriter an adjustment. So this was huge to get some positive notes.

However, there were also areas that I needed to address, which again, to me is fair, given I was stepping out of my comfort zone. And the deadline to re-submit was midnight on July 23rd, leaving me just 8 days to take their critiques, decide what I wanted to implement, and execute on this new vision.

More to come…