Last night, as I was preparing to send out feedback to non-longlistees for the Little Wonder competition, I encountered an IT disaster which basically ruined everything. The discs on which I had the data were corrupted, and I lost thousands of files – the scripts, the notes, recordings, work-in-progress, two of my own plays, and, perhaps most painfully of all, more than 50,000 words worth of feedback to writers that did not make the longlist. To be honest, I’m still rather in shock. And I’m very, very sorry to everyone that was hoping to receive feedback[i].
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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 are delighted to announce the Longlist for our 2018 short radio competition. 17 entries were selected from an incredible 298 submissions. Hit “more” to find out who they were:
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The judges have judged, and the Longlist for the Little Wonder Short Radio Drama Competition 2018 has been compiled. We will announce the names and plays on Monday at noon Paris time, but between here and there we will be tweeting 50 “yes” comments from our judges in 10 batches across Saturday and Sunday. This will help you get an idea of what our judges liked and were looking for, as well as keeping us all exciting for the big announcement!
Please remember that critiques of plays are by their nature subjective, and that a “Yes” from one judge was not enough to get a play on the longlist. That being said, feel free to get terrifically over-excited if you think you spot a comment about your play 😉
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