Sucks, doesn’t it.

So, you didn’t make the longlist.  You read the list of names.  Then, you read it again.  Then, if you’re like me, you went looking for chocolate.

All our judges are writers. That means all of us, at some point, have been rejected. Again, and again, and again. Rejected when we’ve poured our hearts and souls into a piece of work. Rejected when we really thought we’d got it this time.  It hurts. I’m sorry. We don’t want anyone to feel like that.

The most important thing to remember is that rejection is part of the process and happens to everyone. In this post I’m going to talk a little about how we made our decision, the most common mistakes that kept people off the longlist, and those qualities that saw our 17 longlistees make it through. Hopefully you’ll find it useful – more importantly, you should find it encouraging.

Judgements are subjective

One piece that just scraped in at last place onto the longlist received rave reviews from the judges who critiqued it. We all have our own tastes and are own turn-offs. I’d like to tell you that a great piece will shine through regardless – but nope, if the judge isn’t in the mood for shotgun toting demons on motorcycles then even such a masterpiece as that can find itself in the bin.

So, not being picked for the longlist doesn’t mean your play is shit (and CERTAINLY doesn’t mean you are shit!)

HOWEVER, knowing the judges are subjective is an easy excuse to hide behind. I am currently working through every single play we received to give short feedback to you all (this is going to take some time, so please be patient). I have yet to see one that could not have improved its chances. Whatsmore, in many cases, there were simple things that could have been done to greatly improve the entrants shot at the longlist.

How to improve your chances of winning a Radio Play Competition

Read the Rules

Remember these?

Entrants should submit:

• A radio script for a full cast audio drama between 1600 and 2000 words.
• Requiring no more than four actors.
• In English, although writers can be from anywhere in the world.
• Written solo or in a group, but only one entry per person/group.

These were the rules written right across the middle of the BBC advert for our competition.

A good quarter of the plays we received were either below 1600 words or above 2000. Many had too many characters, or characters that couldn’t be cast. Some people submitted plays more than once (I contacted them and asked that they pick one. Apparently, I don’t require sleep or a home life).

Rules can be easy to miss, even rules highlighted in bullet points right in the centre of the post on the BBC website. And we read plays that had broken the entry rules (one made it to the longlist – but we’ve asked them to cut 1000 words before shortlist judgement, no easy task). But I’ll tell you an easy to spot correlation. People who don’t put in the effort to check the rules generally fail to make the effort elsewhere. It’s an immediate warning sign to the judges that this play will be half arsed. Don’t give us an excuse

Copyright: Our much-misunderstood friend.

A lot of writers get very upset worrying about whether their work is copyrighted. As a lawyer, I can tell you that outside of the United States you are worrying over nothing and within the United States you have bigger things to worry about. If you wrote it, you own it. If you can prove you wrote it (i.e. You have dated computer files) you’re fine. If the people who steal your work are powerful enough to ignore this, they’re powerful enough not to care about any “greater” forms of protection. Concentrate on writing the next play.

But there is an area of copyright to which you need to pay VERY close attention: other peoples. We can’t use other people’s music without paying them royalties (this is a very common error in play submission). Equally, if you are using words that other people wrote than you are a thief. It will come back to bite you in the arse.

Slipping across into another area of law, be extremely careful when talking about or using real people. Slander and liable laws can be at least as bitey as copyright. Plus, I find it personally distasteful to write about people who are still living (unless they’re Donald Trump, he deserves everything he gets). Satire is fine, but make sure that what you are writing is clearly satire (i.e. Funny).

Stage Plays vs Radio Plays

Several people submitted stage plays. Some included helpful things like costume designs. One extraordinary direction described how the “corpse gets up silently and leaves the stage.” (Hot tip:  silently is not a good radio direction).  Another person cheerfully noted “sorry, but I didn’t have the time to change all the stage directions”, which was friendly, but it was two weeks before the deadline and they were asking us to take the time on a play that was already not right for our competition.

Why is this a problem? I mean, Little Wonder record stage plays all the time, right?
Well, first, it shows a lack of effort. And that makes us feel unloved. What on earth are we supposed to do with costume descriptions? Making us feel you haven’t made and effort effects our subjectivity and reduces your chance of success.

Second, far more importantly, radio is not stage. You can do amazing things in radio that are totally impossible on stage: giant robots! Explosions! Multiheaded-talking donkeys that play the piano! If you submit a stage play you are automatically putting yourself at a disadvantage compared to anyone that has put the time into thinking about soundscape: how the listener will experience the play as a piece of radio. All our longlistees had something about them that worked for sound.
You wouldn’t submit a painting to a sculpture competition, would you? So, if you’re writing for radio, write for radio. It’s a lot of fun!

Lack of Originality/Boredom

Oooh, this is a tough one. But as the director of a radio station that broadcasts on the internet I get a lot of useful data. And one fact is that bored listeners turn off almost exactly at 2 minutes. That’s the opening music, and 1 to 1 ½ pages of text you must grab them with some dramatic problem impacted a character sufficiently empathetic that they care enough to listen.

The podcast age is brutal. You can’t afford to piss about for five pages establishing character. The story – the initial conflict – must be on the first page, and it must be interesting enough that literally the entirety of the rest of the internet isn’t enough to distract the listener.
For some of you this was a question of being too slow of the mark. There’s one play that I subtly snuck onto the longlist because at page 7 it got good. But the first 6 pages… oh my god. Thankfully, they had enough to keep me reading. But that’s an exception that proves the rule.

For others, the sad fact was that your idea was exciting enough to stop me from going to look at kitten pictures (just kidding, I mostly google news about Star Wars and Doctor Who. And yes, Jodi Whittaker is brilliant [but I miss Peter Capaldi]).

There are two approaches to this. Is the problem big enough? Can you make things worse? I’m not saying have a dozen guys in machine guns burst in a word 100, but, well, to be honest, for some scripts it would have helped. How can I make it bigger, faster, more explosive? Note: If, for example, the play is about a couple revealing infidelities on one’s deathbeds [not a play we received], bigger isn’t “make the oxygen tank explode” but “what if he slept with their daughter instead of their secretary?”

The second approach is about originality. Are you sure you haven’t seen a play about someone waking up in purgatory before? What makes yours different? The best place to look, I find, is in the news. Find something that hits you then throw it in for contrast. Trying to put the two things together will a) bring originality and b)force you to talk about what you really want to say rather than finishing “and he was dead all along.”

Have an idea of to whom you are submitting

We are a feminist radio play company. That’s not a mission statement or anything (or mission statement is “more explosions!”) But company reflects the character of its members, and as a group we don’t tend to find rape jokes, stories about how women or stupid, or stories that marginalise women as “the mother” or “the girlfriend” or “the victim” particularly interesting or amusing.

If you’d read our list of things we were looking for you might have noticed this:

1. Imagination. Make up for the limitations of the medium (no sight) by doing something unexpected.  Tell us a story we’ve never heard before.
2. A full plot. Even a ten-minute play should have a beginning, middle and an end, and characters who have problems they must confront and change to overcome.  If they just walk into the sound booth and start hitting each other with kippers you’ve written a sketch, not a radio play.  Although, to be fair, I’d be very tempted to pass that just to mess with my actors!
3. Humour. You don’t need to write a comedy (in fact, it can be dark as hell), but we do look for a certain wit and intellect in what you write.  That doesn’t even mean jokes.  But show us some wit.
4. 100% less misogyny. Misogynist characters are just fine in their right place but please don’t make us read another play about a struggling male writer who is surrounded by women who adore him but for some inexplicable reason won’t go out with him probably because they’re bitches.  It doesn’t have to be a feminist masterpiece but let’s stay away from certain well tread boards.  While you’re at it, have you considered that your policeman might work just as well as a policewoman?
5. Use of sound. Don’t just write us a stage play without the stage directions cut out (although we do record those from time to time!)  Try to create a soundscape in your head.
6. Make full use of your actors.  Don’t have us bring in a fourth actor just so (s)he can say one line and go home.  It’s disrespectful to the actor and isn’t making full use of the talent available.  Keep thinking to yourself:  is this a role that will be rewarding to the actor?  Chances are, if you manage that, you’ll make it rewarding for the audience as well.

Now, we’re broad minded, so there was, indeed, a piece that made the longlist whilst including some heavy misogyny (we’re hoping the writer will either tame it or find some brilliant way to use it). But it’s well worth doing your research as to who you’re submitting. If you’ve taken the time to find out who we are, then you’ll know your chances of winning with a play that opens on a rape joke of is entirely based around a woman being tied up and tortured by a group of men… well, we’ll read it, but it’s going to have to be amazing to get over the immediate disadvantage you’ve given yourself.

Always take the time to look at the company who are running the play. Always. And for those of you who feel the world needs more rape jokes, I’m sure there’s a red pill theatre company out there somewhere. Just don’t send them to us.

PS.  The other 5 points were probably worth looking at as well.

Spelling, Grammar and Formatting

I’m dyslexic and spelling is a constant struggle. But struggle I do and struggle I must. Many people in the industry are the sort who have never had a problem with spelling and think everyone who makes a mistake is simply lazy. Sorry, they annoy me too, but they have power and we should humour them.
Run the bloody spell check. Get an advanced grammar checker (although the word grammar checker in office 365 is very good now) and run it. Get a friend who spells better than you to read the text. Do not submit work with spelling mistakes.

Every piece of work I’ve ever submitted has had spelling mistakes. Yeah, it pisses me off too.

But at least by making the effort you can change an error ridden text to one that has a couple of excusable faults. If you send a barely legible text it will be hard for us to read, and if it’s hard for us to read it is hard for us to enjoy.

Similarly, I recommended to everyone who entered a standard format for radio plays, providing a tutorial on how to set it up and a word stylesheet that was free for everyone to use.

If you used the stylesheet you made the judges immediately happy – because it was easier to read, because it showed you tried, and because of several technical aspects I won’t bore you with. Easy points scored!  Some of you submitted with perfectly adequate stage play formatting. Ok, fine. We could read it, it didn’t bother us much. But don’t you want to score some easy points?

Finally, there were a portion where the formatting was insane. Tabs all over the place, weird margins, dialogue that started and stopped and started again, tables in the middle of nowhere…. If we can’t read it, we can’t enjoy it!

For those of you who really struggle to use a computer, I strongly suggest you get yourself on a course to use a word processor. This is an essential skill for a writer.  And, in the meantime, if the competition recommends a format – I don’t know about you, but I’m going to use that format. Why make things harder for yourself?

Keep Writing, Keep Thinking Critical

We get better the more we write. Keep on going. You did a cool thing, submitting a play to a competition, and I will try to get feedback to everyone (there are a lot of you, it will take time.) Over the next months, I’ll write a series of articles going into more detail about how to avoid some of the problems I’ve talked about here – please take a moment to subscribe, if you haven’t already, and I’m happy to talk about more particular questions in the comments.

Happy writing everyone!  And don’t ever let a competition discourage you!