2023 November Playwriting Challenge Final Numbers

 Hi folks

I guess it shouldn’t surprise me that it’s taken me over a week to tidy things up on the November playwriting challenge this year but phew…

You all had a pretty staggering writing output this year which made you hard to keep up with, in the best way possible, so keep on writing that way the other 11 months of the year until the November 2024 challenge.

To give you an overview, we had 57 writers sign up this year, and 38 of you wrote every single day of the 30 days of November, which is amazing.

Even those of you who didn’t write all 30 days still wrote most days.  Hopefully everyone has a bunch of interesting raw material to play around with in the year ahead to push your playwriting forward.

You all submitted 1,398 bits of daily writing, totaling 4,066 pages.

Taking a standard two hour full length play to be 120 pages, that means you all produced enough pages to create 33 full-length plays (3,960 pages) (or more than one a day for every day in the month of November).  The leftover pages (106) would make for a nice 60 minute one act play, and another 46 minute one act (or something that would fit nicely into a slot in the Minnesota Fringe Festival).

The most playwrights submitting material in a single day was 54 of you.
Even on the day of the least submissions, 41 writers were turning in material (and that was only for 2 days toward the very end of the month, every other day there were more people submitting work, most days many more writers than that.)

For comparison, we had 47 total writers in 2021
28 writers wrote all 30 days.
So that’s 10 less than this year in both categories.
Those writers turned in 1,021 daily bits of script, totaling 4,090 pages.
You all blew past the daily bits of script and they only just inched by you on total pages, just 24 more somehow.
Their high mark for daily submissions was 44 writers, their low was 29 writers.
Again, you blew past them on both scores.

Last year, in 2022, we had 40 writers, 22 of whom wrote all 30 days.
812 daily bits of script, totaling 2,606 pages.
The high mark for daily submissions last year was 34 writers, the low was 23 writers.
So again, you blew by them this year on all counts.

Not that it’s a competition or anything, but I wanted to provide some context for how awesome and prolific you all were this year.  Well done!

I just compiled a list of handy links for all the challenges for each of this first three years if you want to check in with the blog for some random inspiration throughout the year until it springs back into life again next fall.  You can find them here:

Links to all the 2021 challenges

Links to all the 2022 challenges

Links to all the 2023 challenges


Best of luck with your playwriting in the year ahead, and I hope your year-end holiday season is one of rest and rejuvenation.

Happy writing to you!

Matthew Everett
Literary Director
Threshold Theater

Full List of Challenges for 2023

#1 - More Assorted Dialogue

#2 - Fox and Rabbit

#3 - Place Names for People

#4 - Wonderland

#5 - Snapshots 1

#6 - Art Gallery Titles

#7 - Treat Yourself

#8 - Breakup Songbook

#9 - Not My Blood

#10 - Inevitable

#11 - Fake Tour Guide

#12 - Snapshots 2

#13 - Box of Doorknobs

#14 - The Worst Play You Can Possibly Imagine

#15 - Pictures That Haunt You

#16 - “How did I get here?”

#17 - Occam’s Raisin

#18 - Snapshots 3

#19 - Mystery Office or Newspaper Home

#20 - Reverse Order

#21 - Flower People

#22 - Self-Discovery

#23 - The Vanishing Point

#24 - Snapshots 4

#25 - Mood Music

#26 - Impossible Set

#27 - The Ex Files

#28 - Contronyms

#29 - Snapshots 5

#30 - I Don’t Believe In Ghosts, But…


You can also find links for all the challenges for 2021 here and 2022 here.

Full List of Challenges for 2022

#1 - Assorted Dialogue

#2 - What Haunts You?

#3 - Clown Family

#4 - Smackdown

#5 - “This Guy Told Me He Was A Centaur…”

#6 - Mascots

#7 - Treat Yourself

#8 - Chance Encounters

#9 - “Whose Meadow Is This?”

#10 - Food Vs. Humans

#11 - Background Music

#12 - Omens

#13 - Abscission

#14 - Snowflakes and Other Totems

#15 - Fake Adaptations

#16 - Brains

#17 - Writing For Someone Else

#18 - Games

#19 - Frogs

#20 - Regional Slang

#21 - Mystery Grilled Cheese Sandwich

#22 - Random Sentence Generator

#23 - Location, Singer, Poet

#24 - Band Name

#25 - Fun With Homophones

#26 - Visual Writing Prompt

#27 - Code Words

#28 - Atmosphere

#29 - Messages After You’re Gone

#30 - Storytelling Obsessions

You can also find links for all the challenges for 2021 here and 2023 here.

 

 

Full List of Challenges for 2021

#1 - I Love You, I Hate You, I Love You

#2 - Fire Escape

#3 - Start With A Title

#4 - Science Fiction and Fantasy

#5 - Random Phrase Generator

#6 - Bigfoot By Moonlight

#7 - Treat Yourself

#8 - Series and Cycles

#9 - The Bechdel Test

#10 - Cars

#11 - Punk Monkey, Film Noir and Ride The Pink Horse

#12 - Random Phrase Generator part 2

#13 - Your Favorite Song

#14 - Magic

#15 - Endings

#16 - Poetry

#17 - Holidays

#18 - Words With No English Equivalent

#19 - Random Phrase Generator part 3

#20 - Your Favorite Story

#21 - Technology Gone Awry

#22 - Left Coast Theatre Prompts

#23 - Hidden Histories

#24 - Alternate Timelines

#25 - Unstageable

#26 - Random Phrase Generator part 4

#27 - She Blinded Me With Science

#28 - Companion Plays

#29 - The Best of Times, The Worst of Times, and The Future

#30 - Magical Realism

You can also find links for all the challenges for 2022 here and 2023 here.