When you submit your play to a contest or theater, it’s important to realize that readers and judges are frequently overwhelmed with submissions. As a result, they often look for any reason they can find to reject your submission.
Is your play too long?
Does it have too many characters?
Not formatted correctly?
Mistakes like this can often lead to a quick rejection–sometimes without your play ever being read.
So when you submit your play to theaters, you’ll want to take care to make sure that your play doesn’t get rejected for an easy-to-avoid reason.
With that in mind, make sure that you ***always read the full submission guidelines before submitting.***
It sounds simple. But you’d be surprised how often playwrights forget to do this, and end up shooting themselves in the foot as a result.
Think of it this way: you worked incredibly hard on your play, probably over the course of many months.
The last thing you want is for your play to be rejected for a technicality.
So read the guidelines for every single submission, and follow those guidelines to the letter. That means including everything the guidelines ask for, such as a logline, a synopsis, a bio, and so on.
Also: if the guidelines ask for a specific number of pages, like 10, do NOT send more than that! Trust me, you’ll only be hurting your chances.
(If you have an amazing scene that takes place on page 12, for instance, then my suggestion would be to see if you can rework the beginning to get that amazing scene into the first 10 pages.)
This might be one of the easiest and most straightforward pieces of advice that I’ve given in this blog. But it’s probably also one of the most important–so heed it.