A post appeared on r/Screenwriting this week titled “Getting Desperate.” It reveals more about the screenwriting industry — and whether screenwriting competitions are worth it — than most MFA programs ever will. The writer has been at it for five years. He has an MFA from a top film school. He’s placed at Austin Film Festival, PAGE, and landed in the top 10% and top 15% at Nicholl. He queries managers and producers and hears nothing. He’s been personally recommended to managers by professors and working producers. Still ghosted.
The post has 70+ upvotes and 140+ comments. And the most revealing thing about it isn’t the original post — it’s the responses.
What 140 Comments Actually Said
The screenwriting industry advice he expected — keep querying, enter more competitions, get more coverage — barely appeared. Instead, here’s what the people who have actually broken through told him.
A produced screenwriter said his contest placements — including top 10% at Nicholl — don’t necessarily indicate professional-level writing. Contest judges, this writer explained, sometimes just have to pick a winner even when nothing truly stands out. Landing in the top 10% of Nicholl means there are still 500 writers at your level.
A TV writer who broke in after years of grinding said the path was: live in LA, spend years improving, take small steps, and wait for the stars to align. Then added the quiet truth most people skip over — “luck does play a role.”
A writer who didn’t break in until his mid-40s said he spent 15 years going for it, not counting the decade before that writing on his own. His advice: make things in your own city, build traction locally, and stop trying to impress Hollywood from the outside.
Another produced writer — 10 years in, likely older than the original poster — said progressing as a writer essentially means having better rejections, not more acceptances. You go from being ghosted by referrals to not getting staffed on shows.
A commenter who works on the business side of representation put it plainly: at a certain point, it’s just luck. The work is only part of the picture.
One person asked: “Have you considered having wealthy and influential parents?”
The Numbers Nobody Talks About
Here’s where the desperation stops being personal and starts exposing how the screenwriting industry actually operates.
An MFA in screenwriting at a top program costs between $58,000 and $66,000 per year in tuition alone. NYU Tisch runs roughly $66,000 annually. Columbia is around $63,000. USC’s total cost of attendance, including living expenses in Los Angeles, is approximately $88,000 per year. These are two-to-three-year programs. A writer graduating from a top-tier MFA program can easily carry $120,000 to $200,000 in debt before they’ve earned a dollar writing professionally.
Then come the competitions. The Nicholl Fellowship — the most prestigious screenwriting competition in the world — received over 5,500 submissions in 2024 from writers in 80 countries. Five fellowships were awarded. That’s a win rate of 0.09%. And here’s the number that should stop you cold: since the fellowship’s founding in 1986, only 24 winning scripts have been produced as films. Twenty-four. In 38 years.
One writer on the Scriptnotes podcast calculated that entering major competitions in a single season cost nearly $4,500 in entry fees alone — not counting the add-on coverage that most competitions sell as an upsell. At that price, it’s fair to ask whether screenwriting competitions are worth it at all — or whether they exist primarily to generate revenue from the writers who enter them.
And the pipeline is getting more expensive, not less. Starting in 2025, the Nicholl Fellowship partnered with the Black List as its public submission portal. Writers must now submit through the Black List website with at least one paid evaluation attached. Commenters on Deadline did the math: at roughly $130 per entry with a cap of 2,500 submissions, the Black List stands to generate approximately $325,000 from a nonprofit fellowship program.
The entry fee for the old Nicholl was $50 to $90. The new pathway through the Black List costs meaningfully more — and routes aspiring writers through a for-profit platform that has a financial incentive in keeping them submitting, paying for evaluations, and staying in the cycle.
The System That Profits from Your Presence
None of this is a screenwriting industry conspiracy. It’s economics. MFA programs need enrollment. Competition platforms need entry fees. Coverage services need customers. Screenwriting software companies sponsor competitions to sell licenses. Pitch fests charge writers hundreds of dollars to sit in a room and give a 60-second pitch to a junior executive who has no authority to buy anything. Whether any of these screenplay contests are worth entering depends on who you ask — but the money flows in one direction.
The aspiring screenwriter is not the beneficiary of this system. The aspiring screenwriter is the customer.
The Reddit poster’s five years of work — the MFA, the competition placements, the queries, the referrals — represent a significant financial and emotional investment. And every response in that thread, from amateurs and professionals alike, told him the same thing: none of it guarantees anything.
The produced screenwriter said it directly: “I may be a professional, but my future as a screenwriter is far from secure.”
The 10-year veteran said: “Progressing as a writer is just having better rejections.”
The writer who broke in at 47 said he found his manager through a Reddit friendship that led to a writer’s group that led to a connection at a management company. Not through a competition. Not through a query. Through years of making things and knowing people.
What the Thread Actually Recommends
Read through the 140+ comments carefully and a consensus emerges. Not a cheerful consensus, but an honest one.
Stop querying. Make things. Produce your own short films. Build an audience. Create proof of concept. Find collaborators. Accept that the timeline is measured in decades, not semesters. And understand that even doing all of this correctly does not guarantee a career.
One commenter nailed it: “No one wants to push the train. They want to hop on when there’s momentum.”
Another: “You have to be entrepreneurial.”
Another: “I took one of my already-written pilots and adapted it for audio. Then, I hired actors and recorded it remotely.”
These responses aren’t debating whether screenwriting contests are worth the entry fees. They’re about something bigger: ownership. Build something you control. Create an audience that belongs to you. Stop paying intermediaries for the privilege of being ignored.
The Uncomfortable Math of Ownership
There’s a reason every working writer in that thread gave the same advice instead of defending the screenwriting industry’s pipeline: make your own stuff. Nobody in Hollywood is looking for you. They’re looking for momentum they can attach themselves to.
That mid-40s writer who built traction in Vancouver before anyone in LA noticed — he wasn’t waiting for permission. The writer who turned a pilot into an audio drama and hired actors over Zoom — she’d stopped asking whether screenplay competitions were worth her time and started building instead. The guy who found his manager through a writer’s group that started on Reddit — he wasn’t waiting for a query response.
The screenwriting industry doesn’t teach this. The competitions don’t reward it. The coverage services don’t evaluate for it. Because ownership isn’t a product they can sell you.
The original poster updated his thread after reading the responses. He said the common thread seemed to be persistence, strong work, and luck. Then he said his next move was getting back to actually making things — he has a short he needs to get into production.
That’s the right answer. It was always the right answer.
The industry will not come find you. It never was going to. The only question that matters is whether you’re building something worth finding.
