On Thursday night our Radio Short competition closed with a whopping 298 accepted entrants. Thank you everyone for your hard work and enthusiasm taking part. And huge thanks to the BBC Writers Room for promoting this event.
The last hundred entries were submitted within the last 24 hours, which has created some small (but happy) logistical problems for us. As a result, the timetable for results and resubmission will be as follows:
Teasing of Longlist Notes: Weekend of September 29th on twitter @littlwonder
Longlist Released: October 1st
Longlistees sent full feedback: October 7th
Resubmission of plays with changes by Longlistees: November 5th
Shortlist Announcement: November 26th
Public Performance at Moving Parts: December 16th
Winner Announced: December 31st
As you can see, the only real difference is that the announcement of the Longlist has been pushed back. Longlistees will still have the same amount of time to make revisions before attempting to make the shortlist.
Once the longlist is arranged and feedback distributed I will start the process of working through all the entries looking for other plays that strike me as interesting, opportunities to give extra feedback/helping hands, and generally trying to give as much support as possible to everyone who took part.
Obviously, I cannot contact everybody. If you entered a play but don’t hear from me that doesn’t mean I thought your play was shit – it just means I didn’t have specific feedback for you (or I haven’t got to your play yet.) But I will talk to as many people as I can.
In addition, I am going to publish a series of articles identifying and explaining the most common problems we had with scripts These should be well worth reading for anyone interested in seeing behind the curtain and learning how best to improve their work (I’m expecting to learn a great deal from writing them). If you are interested in learning more about what makes a production company reject a play and how to stop it from happening to you, I encourage you to subscribe to the website and “like” the About Writing Facebook page, so you can keep up with the new work.
Thanks again to everyone who took part and everyone who made this possible. We look forward to sharing longlist feedback with you on twitter the weekend of September 29th and announcing the longlist on October 7th.
And keep an eye out for the new writing articles! I learned a huge amount from reading all these plays and talking to my judges, and I am looking forward to sharing that with you!
