What It Takes To Win The Nicholl Screenwriting Competition

Interesting Q&A with some of the Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition judges: Stephanie Allain (Dear White People, Hustle & Flow), Albert Berger (Nebraska, Little Miss Sunshine), Julia Chasman (25th Hour, Quills), Peter Samuelson (Arlington Road, Revenge of the Nerds), and Dana Stevens (Safe Haven, Life or Something Like It, For Love of the Game). Excerpts:

What do you look for in a winning Nicholl script?

Stephanie Allain: I look for voice. Originality of voice and the ability to tell a good story.

Albert Berger: It’s crucially important to me that I’m moved and compelled by the story and the characters. It has to have a certain level of craft and it has to feel honest.

Julia Chasman: We do have kind of a rubric of qualities that we look for. On our website, applicants can find some questions to ask themselves about the story they want to tell, meant to guide them to include the qualities that we care about: obvious things like character, plot, structure, tone, but also things that are more subtle too, like finding a voice. More than anything we look for a voice that’s authentic, that pulls the reader in with a sense of, “Someone’s telling me a story and I’m involved in it.” Of course there’s also a lot of hard work that goes into getting that voice disciplined.

Peter Samuelson: We’re not only judging the script. We’re also judging whether we think the writer has a professional future and we are encouraging them to spend the next year writing their next script, so it’s not so much a script competition as it is a writer competition. I look for a script that moves my heart. I want a script that makes me cry or makes me laugh. I want strong characters in a well crafted narrative. I want to see something I feel as though I haven’t seen before and, most of all, I want an authentic voice.

Dana Stevens: We are trying to find people that we can encourage in their writing career. Sometimes the scripts that are chosen aren’t necessarily the scripts we would think would make the best movies. There are scripts that show the most promise of a writer who will have a career in Hollywood. Be able to structure a script and have an original voice.

Voice. Emotion. Apart from a professional quality read, this message rings through loud and clear: People judging Nicholl scripts are looking for writers with a strong voice and scripts which evoke an emotional response.

So for all the thinking we do about our stories, don’t forget to feel your way into and through each scene. That’s where you find voice and emotion.

Which reminds me of this quote from Ray Bradbury:

I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.

For the rest of the Q&A, go here.