The end is in sight for this screenplay competition. Or is it merely the beginning? Their website today reads:
"Thanks for your patience, but we've now decided on the finalists for the Red Planet Prize. The quality of entrants has been amazing and it's been incredibly hard to decide on those to make it through."
"Those that haven't made it, take heart. With two thousand entrants we had to be extremely exacting - so do please try again next year! Over the next week, the finalists will receive requests for their full scripts. We can't, unfortunately, individually reply to everyone else, but do keep writing and thank you."
My own full script is 96% finished (just doing some polishing, mainly) so I'll see if I've made it through to the next stage soon enough! But even if I don't make it through, the Red Planet competition has been a great way to kickstart my work ethic and having a deadline has been a brilliant incentive.
The writing hasn't been easy at times. I'm always very critical of my own work, so that makes it tougher. No script is ever truly "finished", so it's hard to know when to stop! There's nothing worse than deleting something that's not quite working in your script, only to find it's had a domino-effect and you're inadvertently unravelling your plot!
Fortunately, that didn't happened to any major degree -- but I did encounter problems that weren't obvious when I wrote my initial outline. But, all said, it's been a slow... but relatively painless experience. It's definitely made me champion the virtues of LOTS of planning before putting pen to paper (fingers to keys?)... so that's a good thing.
"Thanks for your patience, but we've now decided on the finalists for the Red Planet Prize. The quality of entrants has been amazing and it's been incredibly hard to decide on those to make it through."
"Those that haven't made it, take heart. With two thousand entrants we had to be extremely exacting - so do please try again next year! Over the next week, the finalists will receive requests for their full scripts. We can't, unfortunately, individually reply to everyone else, but do keep writing and thank you."
My own full script is 96% finished (just doing some polishing, mainly) so I'll see if I've made it through to the next stage soon enough! But even if I don't make it through, the Red Planet competition has been a great way to kickstart my work ethic and having a deadline has been a brilliant incentive.
The writing hasn't been easy at times. I'm always very critical of my own work, so that makes it tougher. No script is ever truly "finished", so it's hard to know when to stop! There's nothing worse than deleting something that's not quite working in your script, only to find it's had a domino-effect and you're inadvertently unravelling your plot!
Fortunately, that didn't happened to any major degree -- but I did encounter problems that weren't obvious when I wrote my initial outline. But, all said, it's been a slow... but relatively painless experience. It's definitely made me champion the virtues of LOTS of planning before putting pen to paper (fingers to keys?)... so that's a good thing.
