The Shortlist for the Breaking Boundaries Short Radio Play Competition is ready and as follows:
Buddha Hat by Clare Shaw
Flamingo by Thoko Masikini
Like Candy From a Baby by Michael Lin
Pride of Rotterdam by Tom Harvey
The Fall by Zoe Grainge
Warmest congratulations to everyone who made the shortlist. All five plays will be performed and recorded in November, at an as yet to be determined venue in Paris (we lost our usual venue, but two months to find a stage is an eternity in theatre time!)
Our first radio play competition for 2019 is now live and accepting entries until the end of May. This competition is aimed at helping two groups who often find it difficult to get feedback and support: writers of colour and writers with disabilities or long-term illness. We are looking for:
- A radio script for a full cast audio drama between 1600 and 2000 words (10 to 15 minutes).
- Requiring no more than four actors. No children please!
- In English, although writers can be from anywhere in the world.
- Written solo or in a group, but only one entry per person/group.
Full details and the means to enter can be found here:
https://www.aboutwriting.org/little-wonder-breaking-boundaries-radio-play-competition-2019/
And are summarised on the BBC writers room website here:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/writersroom/opportunities/little-wonder
The competition is free to enter and at no point will we ask you for money. We no longer offer recording and publication of your work as a prize for the play, because we don’t want anyone to feel that taking part is a form of unpaid work. However, we will talk to members of the shortlist and a few other pieces we like about potential recording opportunities. You can hear last years winning play, Driveless by Annie Fox, here:
Don’t feel left out if you don’t meet the criteria for this competition – we’ll be running a general access competition later his year. And do please read all the instructions before submitting. We’ll be putting up some details about the judges soon, as well as an interview with Annie Fox about what it was like to take part in a Little Wonder competition.
Good luck, and we look forward to reading your plays! Oh, and don’t forget to subscribe so you can keep up to date with the latest news!
I won a thing!
It was slightly surreal, but just as we were reaching peak activity with the Little Wonder Radio Play Competition I won a stage play competition. I’m certain that organising the first helped me with the second, although the two were quite different. Cité 27 wanted a 27-minute-long stage play, to be played in a 27m2 space, to an audience of 27 people, using only 3 actors. One of the organisers got in touch with me about 10 days before the deadline to say “hey, have you seen this, you should think about submitting”, and because I love a) a deadline and b) a brief, I said “sure, great.” The next day my wife went into labour.[i] Somehow, I managed to finish some sort of play and send it the day before the deadline.
A couple of weeks later I got a lovely email confirming my play had been selected. How? How could such a thing happen? Did I really write a winning play in a week at the same time as dealing with a new baby and very tired wife? Just how many chickens did I sacrifice to Satan?
Well, I can promise you that no chickens were harmed, and that it certainly had nothing to do with talent. But I do have some thoughts about what worked. Read on if you’d like to learn how to fluke your way through a play competition.
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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.
We need you to re-subscribe (sorry!)
I hate to do this, but I need to ask all our subscribers to re-subscribe. And encourage anyone not subscribed to subscribe, because it’s awesome. I promise it’s for a good reason.
After the huge response to our competition and the massive increase in audience both for About Writing and Little Wonder, we’ve been having some logistical problems. Basically, Microsoft thinks we’re a spambot. Many of our mailings are getting rejected, bounced, chucked in junk bins or just going where they’re not wanted.
Giving you a better service (or, erm, any service at all)
To fix this, we are switching back to the Jetpack/WordPress subscription system. The good news is that it will let us be GDPR compliant, make posts you receive easier to customise, and make it more straightforward to unsubscribe if you don’t love us any more (sob).
The bad news is that means we have to unsubscribe everyone then ask you to re-subscribe. Manually. Uurgh. If you are on our current subscribers list, you should receive an email in the next couple of days asking you to confirm that you want to be subscribed. Please click confirm! If you don’t receive the email, or you aren’t subscribed and want to be, then fill out the subscription box to the right or at the bottom of this email. Hell, as long as you’re here, just stick your email in the box. Better safe than sorry. I strongly recommend this if you are taking part in the competition/are interested in are radio shows or writing articles/if you want the good karma that comes with doing nice things to writers. You can see a picture of what it looks like at the top of this post (don’t try to fill in the picture. It won’t work).
The other bad news is that we won’t be able to do our monthly newsletters anymore. I’m going to put our last roundup in this post, and after that you’ll get more prompt notifications when we have new content (lets face it, I was never very prompt.) So, if you’d like to hear more about stuff that happened this month, press more. And please do subscribe!
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