Back in 2019, I entered my western script Welcome to the West into a lower-tier competition because, well, why not? The thing is, and this is partially why screenwriting competitions can be so stupid; I didn’t actually learn that I had placed as a semifinalist until more than two years later.
The results had been online since 2019, but I never received a notification and the competition itself was out of sight, out of mind. It wasn’t until I signed up for Coverfly (which tracks all of your competition placements) that I learned the script had placed as a semifinalist. What’s stupider, however, is that it wasn’t until just last week, five frickin’ years later, that I learned that the “semifinalist” placement in this particular competition meant my script cracked the top 25 for its genre.
That’s pretty cool, even if it was five frickin’ years ago.
It got me thinking: the term “semifinalist” is vague and can vary from competition to competition. Sometimes the semifinals are the top 1%, 2%, 10%, 15% — there’s no standard.
But…saying that my script finished in the top 25 for its genre…top 25 is top 25. On paper, I think that actually looks cooler than simply referring to it as a semifinalist.
Let me be clear about one thing: competitions don’t dictate how talented of a writer you are, nor are they a golden ticket into the industry. In fact, most competitions are run like shit with “industry judges” that are paid poverty-level wages (if that) whose claims to fame was a temp role as a production assistant on an indie remake of The Room that currently has 113 views on YouTube. Most competitions also don’t provide any ounce of transparency into how things are run, how scripts are judged, or what really goes on behind the curtain. Seriously, it could be a free-for-all. In the lower-tier competitions, they could be handing out the prizes to all of their buddies and no one would be the wiser.
So, now that that’s out of the way…why do I bother entering competitions? Well, because I like competition. I like to see how my work stacks up against my peers. It also provides me some validation that I continue to improve. Above all else, I think it’s fun to compete. If you’re looking for anything outside of that, then you should find another hobby.
Anyway, there’s another lower-tier competition that I used to enter which I’m pretty sure awarded every script that was written in legible English a quarterfinalist placement. The competition claimed that only the top 20% or so make the quarterfinal round, but I’m skeptical. There’s another upper-tier competition that received something like 14,000 submissions one year, and the quarterfinals consisted of, like, 2,000 scripts. Yeah, it’s cool to see your work advance, but…eh. Even though this is a more popular competition, I kinda like the top 25 accolade more. It just looks better in a laurel for marketing purposes than simply using “quarterfinalist!” or, even better, “top 2,000!”
If we skip the placement titles and focus strictly on the numerical ranks, then this is what we get:
SKULL CREEK CANYON: Top 10 Thriller (Final Draft Big Break), Top 25 Overall (Roadmap Writers), #9 Thriller Overall (Coverfly), Top 1% Overall (Coverfly), Top 25 Thriller (StoryPros)
WELCOME TO THE WEST: Top 10% (Academy Nicholl Fellowship), Top 25 Western (Creative Voices), Top 25 Drama (StoryPros)
I just like the way those numbers look. Obviously, working in the placements is also a necessity, as Skull Creek Canyon, for instance, has eight of them, even if some are quarterfinalists and don’t qualify for my above experiment.
So, even if those lower-tier competitions aren’t a big deal, being able to say that I finished in the top XX still sounds really cool.