iA is partnering again with NYC Midnight as a title sponsor for the 2025 Screenwriting Challenge.

For over 20 years, NYC Midnight has organized the Inspiring Challenges for Storytellers. As a returning title sponsor, iA will award the top 10 finishers with their own copy of iA Writer for iPad, iPhone, macOS, or Windows.

In addition, the top three finishers will also get a copy of the critically acclaimed iA Notebook—the notebook for writers.

About the Challenge

Already in its 22nd year (wow!) the Screenwriting Challenge (SCC2025) offers international screenwriters a prime opportunity to compete with other writers, get professional feedback on their work, and win great prizes—like iA’s writing tools.1

How it works

Writers are randomly assigned into groups and in each round are given a genre, subject, and character to work with. Judges select the top writers from each group to move on to the next stage:

  1. Round one: Writers receive their first assignment for an original short screenplay of a maximum of 12 pages, to finish in eight days. The top five writers from each group advance.
  2. Round two: Writers have three days to write another screenplay, this time with a limit of eight pages. The top three writers in each group advance.
  3. Round three: In the third and final round, writers have 24 hours to write a screenplay up to five pages long.

The 2025 challenge starts on February 21 and ends on August 6 with the results of the final round.2

Why participate?

Establishing a regular writing habit is just one of many reasons to participate in a writing contest. NYC Midnight’s challenge is especially good because aspiring screenwriters can:

  • Get feedback from the judges for every submission
  • Gain access to the NYC Midnight writing community
  • Keep the rights to the stories they write and submit
  • Have their story published on the NYC Website
  • Win great prizes, from thousands of dollars to industry-leading writing tools, like iA Writer

How iA Writer helps

In 2023 we added support for Fountain files. Seasoned screenwriters are likely already familiar with Fountain, a plain text syntax that leverages the strength of Markdown and is tailored for screenwriters.

You can learn more about Writer’s dedicated Fountain template and how you can maximize screenwriting productivity in Writer here. Since its launch, we’ve continued to improve the Fountain template based on user feedback.

iA Writer is beloved by both amateur and professional writers because it is made for distraction-free writing and nothing else. Some features that enhance your writing experience include:

Focus Mode

iA Writer’s signature feature allows you to focus on one sentence or paragraph at a time. How does it work?

Style Check

Easily spot fillers, redundancies, or clichés that might be creeping into your text. Cut it down to the essentials. You can also create custom patterns to highlight expressions that you want to avoid.

Syntax Highlight

Pinpoint awkward verbs, repetitive nouns, or excessive use of certain parts of speech. How does it help?

Live Preview

Watch your screenplay render in real-time as you work. Or you can choose to work fully focused in the Editor while Preview remains on call.

By using Markdown as you write, you can keep your hands on the keyboard and quickly format your work without fiddling with menus. You can further speed up your formatting using shortcuts. Word count will come in handy too.

No AI!

NYC Midnight’s official rules ban using Artificial Intelligence to enhance your writing. Luckily, iA Writer for iPad, iPhone, and Mac comes with its Authorship tool—a simple but amazingly effective way to track what content comes from external sources like AI—and what belongs to you.3

Registration for the 2025 Screenwriting Challenge is open until February 20, 2025. For full details, please see the NYC Midnight website.

nyc midnight screenwriting story challenge iA writer

Download your free iA Writer trial for SCC2025

  1. The full list of the prizes is available here: SCC2025 Prizes. ↩

  2. A detailed calendar for SCC2025 is available here: Dates. ↩

  3. NYC Midnight, like iA, has been among the first to step back and carefully consider the use of AI in writing. They updated their official rules to prohibit the use of AI in their challenges as early as March 2023. ↩