The Nicholl Fellowship Was Never Going to Save You

This year, the aspiring screenwriting community lost Screencraft. A month later, the Nicholl Fellowship announced that it would be moving under the pay-to-play Black List umbrella.

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In February of this year, competition and fellowship website Screencraft announced that it was permanently closing.

The response across the aspiring screenwriter community on the Internet seems to be, “Screencraft wasn’t that great of a resource anyway, but it’s sad that one more resource for writers is gone.”

Chatter picked up again regarding a different shift again in March:

The Academy Nicholl Fellowship will:

1. Institute a “partner program” accepting vetted scripts from a specific set of film schools, screenwriting fellowships, and filmmaking programs (you can read the full list here).

2. Accept public applications through The Black List, a paid hosting site “for writers to showcase their projects for industry professionals and get high-quality evaluations from vetted readers.”

Attitudes about this in private conversations, on Reddit, and in my Screenwriter Brunch Club community have been ambivalent at best, dismayed at worst.

Photo by Mirko Fabian on Unsplash

The consensus seems to be that there are already so few opportunities for writers trying to break into this hyper-competitive industry that the subsumption of one into the other narrows down the potential paths forward.

There are also questions about the fairness of the cost of submitting to the Black List and the qualifications of Black List readers.

Up until December of last year, I worked as a literary manager at a mid-sized management company. I worked my way up from support staff to junior manager. Before that, I was an intern doing script coverage at various production companies and agencies.

I’ve worked on the literary representation side of film and television for over a decade.

I’ve read so many thousands of query emails that I wrote a book about it.

Writers constantly ask me how to get discovered, and I walk them through the potential paths forward. Yes, one of those paths is the fellowship and competition route, and one of the universally recommended top competitions (for feature writers) is the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. It has been known for having the most talented winners.

Hell, it’s run by the organization that puts on the Oscars.

Many managers I know read the winning Nicholl script every year.

And yet.

I cannot off the top of my head think of a single Nicholl Fellowship success story.

I personally have launched the professional careers of seven different writers, and I have managed the ongoing careers of a dozen more. I previously wrote a breakdown of the statistics behind where I found every single one of my clients as a literary manager. Not a single one of them came from a Screencraft competition, the Nicholl fellowship, or The Black List.

In fact, I’ve joked that every single writer who queries me is a Nicholl quarterfinalist.

Like any competition, a Nicholl placement certainly doesn’t hurt you.

You can and should absolutely include it in your bio, on your creative resume, and in your query email. Placing in something is always better than not placing. But it isn’t enough to differentiate you, and it’s not going to bring you opportunity all by itself.

So many screenwriters have a fantasy of a meritocratic path to success:

You tirelessly work on the first draft of your script.

You finally complete it, do a few edits, and wonder if it’s good or not. So, you send it off to one of the many script competitions out there, and lo! You place in the quarterfinals. Then the semifinals. Then the finals.

Then, oh my God, you are a winner!

You didn’t know that you had what it took.

But, as it turns out, there is something special about your voice. You have the talent and skills that a screenwriter needs to succeed. And you have the professional validation to prove it.

Photo by Iana Andreeva on Unsplash

The next step: leveraging this competition win to gain representation.

You sign with a top literary agent, they send your script out to the town, and a studio snatches it up in an eight-figure bidding war. You can now take your rightful place in a small but impressive line of Hollywood success stories.

Unfortunately, this does not happen.

For literally anyone.

Writers complain in the comments of my LinkedIn posts all the time about how Hollywood refuses to take chances on new voices.

But this isn’t true.

Hollywood takes chances on new voices all of the time.

You just aren’t in a position to see it. Plus, the bar for breaking in is really high. And there is a game to all of this. I’m sorry, but you can’t just be a random outsider and hope that your talent is enough to generate interest in your portfolio.

Furthermore, seeking approval from official gatekeepers is a sign of fear.

It’s a sign that you don’t yet have a masterful understanding of the craft.

Because if you did, you wouldn’t have to wonder, “Do I have what it takes?” You would know that you do. And your ego wouldn’t need the reassurance from signing with a manager or winning a competition.

This might sound harsh, but I need you to be honest with yourself.

Only you can evaluate your current skillset, the narrative you’re telling yourself, and what you are willing to do to succeed here.

You were never going to win the Nicholl Fellowship.

But that’s okay!

Guess what? None of my clients who got paid to write a script by Disney, Netflix, DreamWorks, Wayfarer, Hallmark, or Lifetime won the Nicholl Fellowship either.

And they’re doing just fine.

Release yourself from the belief that there is a straightforward path available to writers with nothing but a script and a dream.

Instead, take your career into your own hands using these 4 re-frames:

Re-Frame #1: Develop a masterful understanding of the craft.

If you are wondering “Do I have what it takes?”

You don’t.

But don’t worry! This is something you can fix. Screenwriting is a learnable skill. Roll up your sleeves and take a class that will open your eyes to the techniques and tools that you need to level up.

Don’t have money for a class?

That’s fine.

Watch YouTube videos on the topic or study one of the many dozens of books out there. Watch your favorite movies, find their scripts on the Internet, and break them down until you understand what does and doesn’t work and why.

Confidence doesn’t come from external validation.

It comes from competence.

And competence comes from a systematic approach to learning, applying what you learn, seeking feedback, evaluating what you need to learn, and seeking that knowledge.

In an ever-perpetuating loop of self-improvement.

Re-Frame #2: Build your own network.

Hollywood is all about who you know.

Your big break will not come from a producer or manager scouring a website with scripts that writers paid to host there. I never did this, and I don’t know a single agent, manager, producer, or executive who does this.

No one has time to proactively seek scripts from unknown writers on the Internet.

We are too busy reading scripts being sent to us by people that we know and trust.

This is actually great news for you as a writer because people in your network will not charge you money to share your script with someone. Now you can save that money and put it towards a class that will level up your understanding of the craft.

Instead of hoping and praying that a gatekeeper will stumble upon your work and love it, take proactive steps to build your personal network of industry insiders.

You can do this even if you don’t live in Los Angeles.

I put together a step-by-step breakdown of the daily habits to do this here.

Re-Frame #3: Become a professional screenwriter immediately.

I say this with all the love in my heart:

Knock it off with this “aspiring screenwriter” bullshit.

Starting right now, you (yes, you reading this!) are an artist. A real artist. A professional writer. I demand that you strike the word "aspiring" from your vocabulary.

The definition of aspiring is "desiring and working to achieve a particular goal."

This applies to every creative at every level.

Everyone in Hollywood is always aspiring, no matter how successful they are at any given time. So there's no need to say that you are "aspiring." It's redundant.

Now that you are a professional writer (wow, how easy was that! What a productive day you have had so far), everything you do is research that makes you a more interesting, more well-rounded, more educated, and more skilled screenwriter.

If you have an office job, that job is training for your writing.

It allows you a peek into the corporate world and to the characters who live there that will resonate with your audience.

If you are working as a barista, that job is training.

It is a period of time in which you get exposure to all kinds of different people from all walks of life. Notice their physical characteristics, their personality traits, and the way you make assumptions about their order based on the information you glean from your first impressions.

Picking up the kids from school is idea-generating time while your car is idling in the carpool line.

Parenting is an endless library of material.

You are an artist. That means you are a student of life.

Everything you do supports your writing. Not the other way around. Life does not take you *away* from your art. Once you adopt this reframe, will you find more resilience as you continue to aspire towards your longterm goals, and your writing skills will improve at an even faster rate.

You will stop looking for others to allow you to call yourself a professional.

Because you can already do that yourself.

Re-Frame #4: Look for the opportunity.

So many writers on the Internet complain how hard it is, how unfair it is, and how exploited it feels to be an “aspiring” screenwriter.

Many managers and executives also spend tons of time complaining.

But not me.

I agree. There are problems in this industry. It is not a meritocracy. Tech has disrupted a business model that used to have a huge upside, and it continues to try and rob this art form of its humanity by shoving so-called “AI” down our throats.

There are tons of things that suck in the world and in Hollywood right now.

2025 has not been easy for any of us.

I will never deny that. I will never deny how hard it is or how unfair it is or how exploitative it is to be a screenwriter.

But.

Dwelling on this for too long will rob you of the resilience you need to succeed in a brutally competitive industry. And even though it’s competitive, scripts are still being sold. Movies are still being made. The content machine must be fed, and citizens of this world need something to watch.

So there is opportunity.

You just have to find it.

Instead of whining about the loss of specific paths to success, chart your own. How can you embody a more entrepreneurial attitude towards your writing business? And yes, how can you start thinking of your screenwriting career as its own business?

Where can you leverage technology, community, and innovation to put the filmmaking process into your own hands?

How can you disrupt the industry from the ground up by refusing to play the game with rules set by big corporations?

There’s nothing stopping you from launching your own film festival, script competition, fellowship, community, or production company. Roll up your sleeves and get a little creative.

Every movie, book, TV show, and myth tells us the same lesson:

No one is coming to save you.

The belief that an adult will reach down and show you the path forward is the belief of a child. Growing up is the art of coming to the painful realization that literally no one knows what they’re doing and everyone else is also making this up as they go along.

Stop thinking about what you lose when other people make business decisions.

Start thinking about what you can gain by making your own.

Franklin Leonard famously started The Black List when he was an assistant and all he had was relationships with producers. Now it’s a multimillion dollar business with its tentacles in multiple facets of the industry and the filmmaking process.

What do you have?

Even if it isn’t much, I bet with some creativity, you can build a door for yourself.

And if you can’t think of a way to get creative, expand your network, talk to entrepreneurial people (outside of the screenwriter community), and consume content that challenges your beliefs around what is possible.

Focus on the things you can control.

Become the professional screenwriter that you want to be.

You don’t need a competition or fellowship to get there.

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