15 Lit Mags that Publish Screenplays & Scripts
Plus an essay on advocating for the recognition of scripts as standalone literary works by Lauren Veloski (Sub Club List #26)
This week, screenwriter, comedy writer, and That’s Bananas founder, Lauren Veloski, shares an essay on her imaginative childhood, the journey to becoming a screenwriter, and the unique challenges and joys of screenwriting, emphasizing the importance of recognizing scripts as literary works deserving of recognition and readership, even when they remain unproduced. Below you will also find a list of magazines that accept screenplays and works of drama.
My first and bestest imaginary friend was named Rena. I was four years old, so it’s fuzzy, but if I remember correctly, she flouted the sly leadership of a Rayanne Graff-type (“My So-Called Life”) and did not subscribe to my parents’ wild hierarchy (seemingly based only on height—the injustice!). She also reliably led me inward. Deeper and deeper into my weird little half-baked imagination.
Another early memory where my playmate is pure artifice: Beginning at age five, I would direct myself as if I were a both hired actor and auteur, splicing my surroundings into worthy scenes. What I’d do was this: snap my fingers once to “start” an ethereal recording (where was this camera? in the sky?), then snap again when I wanted to “cut” the scene. Any boring bits—peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, losing to my grandma at UNO—I skipped past. The next “snap” in my day’s progression would have to be worthy of an audiences’ time and attention. From an ordinary 5-year-old’s day, I built a movie in my head.
Don’t get too excited, I was no prodigy, and the subject matter was of course reliably banal—in fact, there was no story to speak of! Just me existing as per kid-usual (kindergarten, snacks, “chillin,” Mary Poppins, etc.), but reshuffled into snippets of my tiny human choosing.
I had zero understanding back then that what I was doing was “writing” and “directing.” I didn’t know what the hell a “scene” was. I also had no nose for story or trackable narrative. None. If anything artistic was dawning within me at all, it spoke purely in the swooshy physical language of a Terrance Mallick film—a “feeling” that something magical was happening as I, say, sprinted across my grandma’s backyard in the rain. A “feeling” that a rainbow over my playground was worth recording with my snaps. A “feeling” that when I wrote an “I’m running away forever!” note to my mom on a post-it, stuck it to our toilet, packed myself a Ziploc bag of baby carrots, I would subsist on “forever,” and did a single loop around the block: ALL this was drama worthy of documentation.
Baby Terrance Mallick Me snapped with my little fat fist, then snapped again. Wow, am I brazenly suggesting I was a young Terrance Mallick!? To be clear: NO, and I WAS NOT! But, you catch my drift. Something was a’brewing. Even if only I knew it, even if only inside me.
When I became a screenwriter, the implicit promise was that I could now bring my imagination-pinging inner universes into our actual, physical, shared universe. That my inventions would become marquee-sized. I’ve had success at prestige film festivals, and sold a movie to IFC/Sundance, but even when you’re winning at it: Screenwriting is always pushing your buttons and making you sweat. You quickly learn two tricky tenants of the industry: 1). Any trained monkey can write a screenplay and many do (this is true, but also not true—to do it well requires rigorous craft), and 2). there are a bazillion brilliant unproduced scripts floating around out there—millions of humble PDF icons waylaid on writers’ laptops, quietly biting their nails in the upper right corner of a desktop screen, waiting to be discovered and unleashed.
Professional screenwriting—notoriously cut-throat and largely about who you know—can feel eviscerating. A middle finger to your sublime and rigorous writerly efforts. Ask even the most successful screenwriter if they have any unproduced scripts sitting up there in the cloud, and they’ll reliably get a dreamy, far-away look in their eyes. Sometimes, these drafts weren’t ready for the world and need more work. But often these scripts are the author’s very best inventions—scripts with morally complex protagonists who the studio heads said an audience “would never root for.” Or sci-fi scripts that went one step too bizarro for the masses. Female protagonists who swore too much, or kicked too many asses. The best cake is a layered cake, but sadly that’s not how Hollywood likes to lunch.
Add to this, a writer’s path—wildly successful writers included—is inevitably forged through layers of creative loss: the “babies” we kill when we realize our half-hatched plots or verbose monologues are actually ruining our visions, the drafts we rewrite into unrecognizability, submissions rejected, characters renamed, entire novels scrapped. We world-builders walk hand-in-hand with tremendous power—and thus we live with frequent, gutting partings.
But for screenwriters in particular, a maddening additional layer of loss exists. Even our most polished works often remain hidden away, too private—utterly invisible in perpetuity if never produced for the big screen or picked up for streaming. It’s a real fucking drag—all that work, all that beauty, all that dialogue slaved over, the plot twists, so many gorgeously fumbling characters unsung and uncelebrated while you wait for your script to sell.
A screenplay is a wholly unique art form. It’s not prose, it’s nowhere near as word-drunk as poetry, and many in “the biz” will describe it only as a “blueprint,” a map telling actors what to say and outlining the basic rubric of a fictional world for a director’s eventual take-over. But anyone who has sweat/bled/cried lovingly over their screenplay at 3 A.M. knows a script is so much more than that. A script is a love letter. A “how to fall in love with this character.” A “how to forgive this abject MESS of human by stacking their troubles against the wild machinations of fate, then artfully catching their fallen face in the light of a streetlamp.” A well-written script will be as specific as poetry, but as broad as the Bible. It’s three dimensions and four walls. A kind of voodoo novella, walking around in plain sight, propping up a lumpy body in mom jeans (your protagonist, of course).
In my scenes’ “action” descriptions (which need to be peak economical in word count, descriptively very sparse), I am always training my language on embedded meaning. Subterrain layering, I call it. Exactly because I shouldn’t write a lavish, roiling paragraph in a script, and must keep it lean and clear, every motherfucking word of that script is gold. Every single word builds my fictional world with the packed precision of true love. A script is devotional. An act of true love. Ooey-gooey, beating and bleating.
I teach a screenwriting course on how to mine your teenage self for story and character gems, and the reason the work we do in class resonates so deeply for my students is that in writing a script from the depths of our teenage hell, we are building our innermost selves an all-new home—with love this time, shame banished. A comedy or a vampire series or a rom-com where everything goes right (for once!). Whatever the script genre, this journey of befriending our former selves and reimagining them as worthy protagonists requires diligent self-acceptance—the exact type of glorious self-forgiveness that our real word is missing in a measure of mountains. We’re building safe harbors with these scripts. What work is more essential and needed than this?
I don’t know when it happened, but in recent years some literary magazines have started publishing script excerpts. And in 2022, screenwriters Eva Aridjis and Christine Vartoughian founded (Screen)Play Press (bless them!), which is committed to publishing fantastic, unproduced screenplays as books. Their mission statement blew my mind: “We believe scripts are literary works which can stand on their own and should be available to readers in bookshops and online, regardless of whether or not they have been produced.” I’d always felt this in my bones, but the film industry has historically treated scripts as purely logistical outlines—bullet points for the director’s superior reimagining.
Writers don’t need the kind high-volume adulation actors do. But we do write to move people. We write to leave people engrossed and searching and undone and reborn. And our work—deeply practical in its construction, but often also deeply literary—deserves a life in the real world. Scripts are also often flat-out JOYS to read. Fun and fast. Dense and character-rich. High-stakes and utterly unbounded in their vision.
I like to imagine the messy computer desktops of screenwriters all over the globe, their unproduced PDFs lit up like windows on your favorite night walk. Think of it: millions of tightly constructed scenes, crystalline and hilarious dialogue, fictional humans humiliating themselves left and right in showstopper scenes—all amplified by the light of cinematic truth, and a beautiful score to boot. Each a portal. On my laptop alone, after 16 years of drafts and fickle inspiration, there must be 500 unproduced scenes. Scenes encapsulating perfect and perfectly fucked-up little universes. All gorgeously weird, wondrous, distinct.
Write them truthfully, screenwriters. Built your visual-visceral worlds. Then set them free.
If you want to learn more about screenwriting from Lauren, her latest Write or Die workshop starts this Sunday (Nov. 5th)!
Your Teenage Self Was a F***ing Star! - In this 4-part screenwriting intensive, we’ll revisit who we were in high school and roll around in the cringey nostalgia. Leave with an all-new teen "protagonist" character and a ready-to-write series or feature script concept!
Bonus! If you take this Teenage Self workshop, you will receive $50 off Lauren’s January workshop, Screenplays By Badass Women (Including You!): Study The Greats, Become The Greatest!