Your script has been "almost done" for how long now? Six months? A year? Three years? Here is the thing nobody tells you about finishing a screenplay. It does not get finished because you finally feel inspired. It gets finished because you finally focus the f up and power through to the end. And then the pesky rewrites. Without a deadline, you can be dead in the water. I once had to call my writing partner and tell him he had to give me a deadline on something because I wasn't working on it, but I thought about working on it all day. And he'd made the mistake of telling me, oh just finish it up whenever. So he told me next Thursday and next Thursday, it was done! That is what a script competition is actually for. A script competition can be your "next Thursday." Forget winning. Forget the laurels. Forget whether the contest "matters" or whether the judges "get" your work. None of that is the point right now. The point is a date on the calendar that you cannot move. Pick a comp. Mark the deadline. Now your draft has a job. A few real ones with real runways: Austin Film Festival. May 27, 11:59pm Central. Two days. If your feature is in shape, hit send. Tubi x Black List Horror Initiative. Open through June 30. One Black List evaluation gets you eligible. Tubi produces the winner. Scriptapalooza Fellowship. Final deadline July 1. Mentorship, not just laurels. Five weeks to get one script genuinely ready. Big Break, PAGE Awards, Shore Scripts. All have summer windows. Look them up. The number of writers in this community who have a script that is 85% there is enormous. The number who have a finished, submitted draft is much smaller. The gap between those two groups is not talent. It is a deadline. So here is the ask. Drop a comment below. Tell us: 1. Which competition you are entering 2. The deadline 3. The script you are sending Public commitment. We will check in. You do not have to win. You have to finish. More on the full comp calendar next week. For now, post your next Thursday.

Edit: People, go find the openings, edit your threads and drop them in so we can all see them! Just wrapped the new members call. Talked through the 5 things I look for when I open a script. Every one of them has to show up in your first few pages. Usually not because you planned them on page 1, but because you did the real work everywhere else. The opening is one of the last things you write. You launch out to sea. You find your way back. Then you build the opening that earns it all. Here they are. 1. Voice Not showy. Not clever. Confident. The reader needs to feel, inside a paragraph, that you know what you're doing. That you didn't research this world, you lived in it. When you read Tim's script, the machinery is dense at first. Helicopters, gear, procedure. And then you settle in and think: oh, this guy is the real deal. That's voice. It's the subconscious trust you build with a reader who's looking for any excuse to stop reading. 2. A Great Character We Can't Look Away From Someone with a primal drive we recognize. Even if they're working against themselves. Woody is jealous. Marty Supreme is a con man. Rick in Casablanca is closed off and cynical. Shrek is a bachelor hiding in his man cave. The moment we meet them, something hooks us. Usually because the character is in conflict with themselves and doesn't even know it. External obstacles bore me. Internal contradiction is where the good stuff lives. 3. A Fresh Premise Usually a familiar genre with a surprising angle. Signs is every alien invasion movie ever made, but tiny. One house. One widower. A crisis of faith. Shrek 2 was pitched to us as Meet the Parents, only Fiona brings home Shrek. Take something that feels done. Give it a perspective nobody's seen. That's the job. 4. A World That Feels Lived In Specific details tell the reader a real person lives here. Page 1 of Signs. Graham walks into the hallway, picks up a balled-up pair of sweat socks and a kid's sweater from the floor, drops them in the hamper. He's a parent. That one beat does more than five pages of dialogue ever could.

It's a joy to watch your pages and characters grow and evolve, @Anna Fermin! That's what this place is all about. Thank you for showing up with your work!

I want everybody to have a chance to work in one of these sessions, so dropping the link below and opening this session to anyone who wants to join. If you're reading this that means YOU! Cowork Session - Tuesday April 6, 10 a.m. Pacific

Very rough. Just mapping this out. The Writer's Forge, Great Character Challenge