Flying Monkeys | A.D. Croucher

Last time, we looked at ways to get your self-published novel out into the world. For those of you who aren’t novelists, we wanted to spend some time on you! We’re nice that way.

SPN Dean Nice

If you write short stories, or scripts, or songs, just for example, there are other things you can do to get your work noticed.

For screenwriters, competitions are definitely something you should look into. There are some notable and reputable comps out there: PAGE Awards, Scriptapalooza, the highly prestigious Nicholl Fellowship (run by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, AKA, the Oscars!), Final Draft’s Big Break, the Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition, the Set In Philadelphia Screenplay Competition, etc. What these have going for them is a combination of great reputation and judges who are working in the film and TV industry. Winning is nice, of course it is. We love winning. But if someone in the industry likes your script and wants to meet you and read more, that’s even better. The huge, almost unsurmountable challenge you face as a screenwriter attempting to break in is getting your work read. Competitions like these will help that happen.

Another route you can take is uploading your script to The Black List. You’ll pay a small fee for hosting, you can pay a larger fee for evaluations (which give you detailed coverage on your script, plus it adds to your ratings—yes, people will rate your scripts on there). It’s another way to potentially get more industry eyes on your work. If your scores are high enough, you’ll be included in an email that gets sent to industry subscribers on weekly basis, highlighting the top scripts on the site.

Now, you might be a songwriter. In which case, we’re going to recommend competitions again. If you’re inclined in a country direction, you have to go for the NSAI (Nashville Songwriters Association International) Annual Song Contest. You can enter your song as a performance, or on a lyric-only basis. Well worth it (as is joining your local NSAI chapter).

If you write outside of country, there are other contests you can look at: The Great American Song Contest, and the International Songwriting Competition, are just two notable examples.

Of course, you also have to just get your music out there, which means putting your songs on YouTube, SoundCloud, or your own site, tweeting them out, Instagramming clips etc. And, if you’re a performer too, start playing wherever and whenever you can. Bars, pubs, clubs, whatever works.

Last but not least, short stories. There are probably thousands of journals and publications that accept short stories. Your job is to research them and find the ones where your stories might fit. Great resources for research are Duotrope and ShortStops. Look for journals, magazines, quarterly or yearly anthologies, standalone anthologies. Of course, you have to try The New Yorker. Send copies of your story to competitions. Keep sending. This is a raw numbers game. Send hundreds or even thousands of times. Set them free!

Fly my pretties

Much the same applies to the poets among you. The New Yorker has online submissions for poetry, and there are many other outlets too. Find them and send them your work.

The common thread to all of this is research and legwork. You have to find the places that seem like they’ll be receptive to your work, and then get your work to them. More often then not, you’ll be sending your creations out to hundreds more places than will actually accept them, but that’s the life. That’s the game. Just keep creating, keep enjoying creating, be super organized about your submissions, and don’t. Ever. Stop.

You can do this!

You Got This

OK. Let’s recap. You wrote the first draft. You’ve given yourself a break and you’re ready to look at your work with fresh eyes. That original first draft is saved, hopefully in a few locations… you know, just in cases.

Jamie

Now it’s time to go through it and make sure you have the all-important plot.

Because the plot is your purpose for telling the story; it’s the glue that holds your masterpiece together.

Stories come to us in fits and bursts. Sometimes they flow, and other times they trickle, and often, the story you thought you were telling when you first started typing is a completely different tale by the time you’re done. Which means you have to go back and make sure that everything is cohesive.

Basically, you don’t want your work to be Rachel’s Thanksgiving dessert from Friends. Ground beef is fine, but not in a fruity dessert. Make sure you all your ingredients make either Shepherd’s Pie or an English Trifle, not some unpalatable combination of the two. (Genre-mashing can be great, but it has to be done smoothly!)

Rachel Trifle

English foods aside, you don’t want contradictions in your plot. With your characters, it can be a good thing, even a grounding thing, as long as you give solid character-based reasons for it, but with plot it can weaken your tale. This means cutting the “ground beef” out. The old kill your darlings quote applies here. You might have a great scene or awesome character, but if it undermines your plot it’ll have to be saved for another story — the one about Shepherd’s Pie, perhaps?

Everything must serve the plot. And if you’ve done your job well, plot and character will overlap majorly. Even in a case-of-the-week TV show, the cases tie back to the main characters’ season/series arcs in some way. In the CW’s Supernatural, for example, at the exact moment Sam Winchester is facing the possibility of having to sacrifice his brother Dean for the greater good, the brothers meet a girl with a werewolf sister who is out of control.

Supernatural Werewolf

If she can’t tame her sister, she’ll have to make the ultimate sacrifice and take her out. The episode is a tight standalone story, but it holds up a mirror to the brothers’ relationship and hints at what might be coming for them.

Awesome costume design detail: Sam and Dean are even wearing the same color scheme as the sisters, to help emphasize the mirroring

And remember, your plot manipulations and machinations and mechanics—and other things beginning with “m”—shouldn’t be obvious. There shouldn’t be billboards advertising “foreshadowing”… it should be subtle AND entertaining. Some of the best stories, the ones that stay with us, only reveal how it’s glued together much later in the story. (The gold standard of awesome plotting is still Die Hard, btw. Just saying).

So in this first pass of editing, focus on removing what doesn’t work. e.g. scenes that don’t further the plot or the character, or slow things down, or take your story off track in some way (no matter how much you love it), add in what’s needed to keep the plot together, and finesse each point so that the reader can’t see the working mechanics of it all. You can do this by making key plot moments funny, or action-oriented, or a major character moment… or distract the reader with flying monkeys… you’re basically being a magician and using sleight of hand, making the reader/audience see one thing, when you’re really doing something else.

Flying Monkeys

For example, in the opening minutes of Die Hard, John McClane’s seatmate on the plane tells McClane that when he gets to his hotel, he needs to take off his shoes and socks and “make fists with his toes” to relax. McClane thinks this is crazy, but when he gets to Nakatomi Plaza, he does it, and it works. You think that’s the payoff… but that’s the moment when Hans Gruber shows up, forcing McClane to spend the rest of the movie barefoot (and to run over broken glass at one point). That throwaway comment was a setup to help make things very difficult for the hero later on — something all plots need to do!

It’s a setup for a plot point that’s also a character beat… and it happens so quickly and entertainingly you don’t notice it’s either! That’s how it’s done folks

It’s true that characters can change us and scenes can stay with us, but a good, tight plot is what makes us fall in love with everything in the story. No matter what type of story you’re telling, there should always be a bit of romance between the story and the reader. The plot is how you woo them to fall in love with your work.