Anyone who's ever been anywhere near a writing competition of any kind -- be it as a contestant, an audience member or a judge -- knows the sad fact that it's almost inevitable that really terrific work will somehow fail to capture the adoring attention of enough judges in just the right way and will be overlooked.
I was curious to take a closer look at this year's entries to the Hear Me Out Monologue Competition, specifically to examine the pieces that were really great pieces of writing that somehow failed to accumulate the high scores needed to advance to the finalist round. Specifically I wondered if I might be able to identify some patterns, common flaws which were working against some really terrific writing getting its proper due.
What I found may surprise you. It certainly did me.
For any writer preparing work to submit to a seriously competitive opportunity of any kind, these 6 flaws could make the difference between taking home the gold and barely seeing the light of day.
I suggest you copy this list and hang it somewhere in your workspace as a reminder so that every time you’re prepping a submission, you take some time to try and eliminate these obstacles.
I like to think of these as six guests you really don't want crashing your party cause they will work against your ambition for your submission by distracting the judges from the power and brilliance of what you've created. Show them the door and your chances of success will greatly improve.
We’ll count down from 6 to 1, saving the most important one for last.
#6: Typos and punctuation problems
It may not seem like in the grand scheme of things your brilliant powerfully moving work should be penalized for the odd misplaced comma or incorrect use or their, there or they’re. But here’s the thing. I know our judges are trying to look directly into the heart of each monologue, to understand its central character, to feel its pulse and not intentionally penalize you for typos. But we’re human. And if there are enough misspellings, incorrect or confusing uses of punctuation or incomprehensible sentences, the effect is this. The reader of the piece has to work harder to feel it as they read from start to finish. They may have to stop, go back a couple lines to figure out your intention. And when that happens, guess what? Their emotional investment in your piece suffers.
#5: Layout on the page
Let’s imagine there’s a major explosion in the middle of your monologue. How you decide to place that interruption on the page is going to make a difference in how your reader spots it as the major interruption it is or whether they potentially miss it entirely.
Also, it may strike you as absolutely trivial but I was surprised to discover that submissions with hard-to-read fonts or inconsistent line spacing or line breaks tended to get lower scores. Now I know this is unconscious on the part of the judges because I am so specific about how the pieces are to be judged. Still human beings are not computers (thank god) and anything that makes it a little harder or more complicated for me as the reader to imagine and hear and see the monologue from start to finish is competing with your chance to grab a judge where they live -- to make an emotional impression.
We may sound rather intellectual sitting in the restaurant discussing the show we all just saw together but make no mistake as it is unfolding in the theatre and we are sitting in the dark, it is an emotional experience. We're not thinking our way through your story, we're feeling our way through it. And every little interruption to provide a footnote or reveal the need for one is an interruption in my emotional journey with your characters through the story you're telling.
#4: The Last Line
There were several gorgeous monologues this year that felt unfinished or incomplete because although the writer had a beautifully wrought idea that really kept us engaged, it felt as though they had not figured out how the ending should feel for the audience.
Any piece of theatre (or literature for that matter) can end in a number of ways. Think about your favorite pop songs. Some end with a bang. Some peter out. Some end with a hiccup. These choices make a world of difference in how an audience is going to feel about the overall piece and your choice should be carefully aimed at the emotional content of what preceded it. It’s human nature that no matter how you end your piece, we are going to use that end as a final lens through which to revisit the piece in its entirety. Choose the wrong type of end and you risk potentially getting in the way of your audience appreciating the depth and gravitas of the whole piece. Or on the other hand, sometimes an ending too formal and sharp can risk throwing a lighthearted charm piece into unwanted (and unhelpful) comparison to other pieces with more natural heft. The last line also does something else in monologue that’s extremely important. And that is it signals to the audience something about the main character’s likely future beyond where we leave them. Last lines can hint at hope for some much needed change. Or they can confirm our worst fears about this person and the world that lies ahead of them.
#3: Too Long or Too Short. (But Usually Too Long)
The length is at odds with the content. Some pieces need to be longer than others because of the emotional weight of its core content. Usually lighter material would tend to be shorter and heavier longer but I am thinking of two glaring exceptions to this: Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro is more than 4 hrs long and yet it’s one of the funniest most charming of the Mozart DaPonte operas. Also the play by Harold Pinter, Ashes to Ashes about the Holocaust, has a running time of, I think, 50 minutes. And yet it really couldn’t be longer. Often when we’re writing out a new idea for something we’ll generate two or three times as much material as is really needed to make the point successfully. Generating more material than needed is, of course, part of every writer’s process. Just be sure you’ve carefully combed through the piece and confirmed for yourself that something is getting stronger or tougher or funnier or sadder as the piece progresses. If it seems that a section near the beginning could easily be swapped with the second to last beat of the piece, you need to take a closer look at what’s supposed to be developing. When cutting a monologue, remember to ask whether your central character can survive the cut and be sure you’re not confusing the needs of the writer with the needs of your character. Your needs have no business entering into it in any way whatsoever.
#2: Unintended Distractions
Let’s say you’ve written a powerfully moving piece and your main character’s name happens to be Kamala. But you mean no association with Kamala Harris the current Vice President of the U.S. You should change the character’s name to avoid even the possibility that someone might assume your intention is to somehow comment on the Vice President.
Well, then it’s like you’ve paved the top of a road suggesting to your audience that they ought to go down it. But it actually goes nowhere as the association is unintended.
When an audience (or a reader) spends more than a half a minute in search of a connection or an answer or a solution to a puzzle or a riddle where none exists, they lose just a little bit of faith in your ability to deliver one unified story with a complete and self-contained universe of feelings, themes and ideas.
#1: The Wrong Title
With the exception perhaps of the unfathomably high number of submissions we get each year which are not actually monologues but short stories dressed up as monologues, entries bogged down by a lousy title is by far the most common problem found in submissions each year.
And I would bet in at least 50% of submissions to all writing competitions everywhere. the same is true.
Your title does several things for the reader or audience. First and foremost it provides a frame (or in some instances even more than a frame, a lens) through which the actual story can be understood. Here’s an example that will hopefully make this concept immediately recognizable. The 2019 Academy Award winning film Parasite from South Korean director Bong Joon-ho would probably not have won a single award had it been called something more mundane like Whose Address is this Finally? or less universal and judgmental like Something Disturbing is Lurking Beneath the Happiest Family Picnic in all of Seoul.
The title Parasite has a very specific effect on everyone who watches the film. We all spend the majority of the film’s running time asking ourselves the same question about each character as they are enter the story:
Is he the parasite?
Is she the parasite?
And so by the end of the film we cannot help but regard the word “parasite” with some skepticism in part because we’ve been unable to clearly pin the label on one central character. So we leave the movie theater with an understanding that several characters in the story surely regarded certain others in the world as parasites of one kind or another but arriving at consensus around these conclusions would be next to impossible.
And so, the film’s title encourages us to return to the scene of the crime, to review the content of the film with a skeptical lens that, oh by the way, just happens to be completely earned by the consecutive receding layers of understanding. We’ve seen a film which suggested to us one view of reality only to then pull the rug out from under us when it reveals how completely flawed our initial assumptions were. And then, again, we think we understand the world until the filmmaking says: Oops. Not so fast. Try again.
No matter what title you choose for your piece, remember this about titles. They have to work in at least two ways. They should draw us in before we’ve seen the work by suggesting something about the tone or the content or the setting. And then, when the piece is over, that title needs to refresh itself by revealing something of its significance in relation to everything we now know about the story. And this is where so many titles just disappoint. If I come to the end of your novel and the title doesn’t sound and feel different to me as a result of my having just experienced your epic story, it’s not the right title. The best titles leave room for me sitting in the audience to put something together so that I feel like I’ve participated.
A Final Word About Contests and Festivals with Themes or Writing Prompts
One final note about entering contests which include a writing prompt such as ours. You really need to take some time to meditate on the prompt before committing to an idea. And generally speaking, if a writing prompt is rich and nuanced (as I think ours have been) you’ll want to push past your first idea and even your first few until you arrive at a solution that feels fresh and surprising but also grounded in the fundamentals at the heart of it. The weakest solutions are generally the ones that never bother to dig deeper than the top surface meaning of the prompt. So, many entries this year included lots of language like “when I finally named it, then I understood…” And because ours is a monologue competition, if you never got to a place where your character grabbed the reins and went running off in whatever direction suited them more than you and your high concept for the piece, you could not have succeeded in one of the most important elements of the form: the exploration (and excavation) of character. The audience must first and foremost believe the central character is a fully plausible human being with intentions and strategies we can’t immediately identify. If I can tell you precisely what your character wants and how they’re going to pursue it from the start you’ve allowed for no suspense in your telling and you’ve thus left us with nothing to figure out. Give me all the answers right up front and I’ll give you an audience counting the minutes til they can escape to dinner and a cocktail and conversation about anything but that most unremarkable little piece they just sat through.
It’s never a good idea to go digging through your files in search of a finished piece that you can convince yourself fits the festival theme. It’s almost impossible for that piece you wrote 10 years ago to compete with all those other pieces that other very clever writers came up with just to satisfy the specific idea, theme, tone or je ne sais pa of the Call for Entries.
I hope you found these observations helpful. Please consider sharing this piece via social media and posting a comment right here. I’m always eager to know how this strikes you.
The next offering of my hands-on workshop, ADVANCED MONOLOGUE is coming up soon. This time the workshop will run for four sessions culminating in a public presentation of work generated in class. Dec 12, 17, 21 and 28. Details and registration at Roland Tec Teaching dot com.
