Short story sale! They’re saying this is the next Gone Girl.
Genre: Mystery/Thriller (Short Story)
Premise: A young woman decides to impersonate a girl who went missing ten years ago, only to walk into a family that knows a lot more about the disappearance than they’re letting on.
About: Make sure to respond to Hollywood people who want to talk to you! If Joe Cote had gone with his first instinct, he would’ve ignored the opportunity that led to a short story sale and now Sydney Sweeney signing on to star in an adaptation of his Reddit story. Here’s some insight from a Daily Mail article: “The teacher [Cote] had been more than a little skeptical when he saw a Reddit message last spring from an alleged LA talent manager about a short story he’d posted four years earlier. He ignored that first query about ‘I pretended to be a missing girl,’ which he’d written in November 2020 in the apartment he shared with his cousin outside of Boston. But the manager followed up. ‘I remember checking with my girlfriend saying, “All right, well, I guess as long as I don’t give him too much personal information or give him my credit card information, I think I could maybe reply,”’ Cote said.
Writer: Joe Cote
Details: about 4000 words
Viral short story. Surprise Hollywood sale. Sydney Sweeney. Please let those three presents be under my tree this Christmas. For Joe Cote, however, Christmas has arrived.
There are a lot of fun details about this sale but one of the biggest is that it took four years for someone in Hollywood to find the story and want to do something with it. That’s right. Joe Cote posted this short story in 2020. It only recently got noticed by someone of significance. Crazy!
Despite the waiting, however, it’s another reminder that you can’t get success unless you put your stuff out there. And the more places you put it out there, the better the chances are of someone seeing it. I’ve seen too many writers who are precious about their material and you just can’t be that way. YOU CAN’T! So get your stuff out there. Start by submitting to Scene Showdown, which happens THIS WEEK.
What: Scene Showdown
Rules: Scene must be 5 pages or less
When: Friday, March 28
Deadline: Thursday, March 27, 10pm Pacific Time
Submit: Script title, Genre, 50 words setting up the scene (optional), pdf of the scene
Where: carsonreeves3@gmail.com
Our story begins in the third person, discussing the disappearance of Mikayla Murray from her Indiana home 10 years ago, when she was 18 years old. She was supposed to hang out with her young brother, James, that night but instead, drove off in her car and never returned.
The operating thesis had her college boyfriend involved somehow but nobody could prove it. After hashing out all backstory details in third person, the writer of the story then says, “She was about to return home after more than a decade. Because I’m Mikayla Murray, and I ran away that night to start a new life.”
It’s a little confusing at first. “Wait, you’re Mikayla, the missing girl?” No, as it turns out. She’s someone who’s about to impersonate Mikayla. Some of you may be making fun of me since the title is literally, “I pretended to be a missing girl so I could rob her family.” But I didn’t read that title going into this cause I wanted to experience the story fresh.
Anyways, Fake Mikayla, who we’re now experiencing in the first person (a distinctive difference from screenwriting, which is always in the third person), explains that she’s a homeless drifter who looks enough like Mikayla that she thinks she can fool the family long enough to get in, rob them, and then get out.
Mikayla shows up at “her family’s” doorstep and the mom immediately bursts into tears. As does the father. They can’t believe it’s true. It looks like Fake Mikayla’s plan is working! That is, until, she gets upstairs, alone, with James, her younger brother who’s now 17. Spoilers follow.
James starts yelling at her. You aren’t effing Mikayla! How do you know that, she replies. Because Mikayla is buried over there – he points outside to a gazebo in the back yard. And their dad put her there! Mikayla doesn’t have time to process this. James is grabbing his things and saying they need to leave NOW. Dad is going to kill them!
They jump out the back window and start running. The dad starts shooting at them. Fake Mikayla finds cover behind the gazebo and uses her lighter to light it on fire (I guess to distract the dad??). James starts freaking out. “WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT!?” But Fake Mikayla doesn’t stick around to argue. She’s GONE GIRL.
Cut to several days later and we get an actual newspaper article explaining that the fire department was called to put out a fire and found the real Mikayla in a small room underneath the gazebo. Oh, and one other small detail. SHE WAS STILL ALIVE before the fire started. Duh-duh-duhhhhhhh.
A lot of writers come to me asking how to write a short story that Hollywood wants. Specifically, how long (short) should it be? The sweet spot seems to be between 4000-5000 words or, roughly, one fourth of a screenplay.
But that’s just a technical spec. The real struggle comes in determining the time frame of the story. How long should the story be in real life days?
Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of consistency to that answer. My instinct is that you want a contained portion of time because that’s where you have the most control over the drama. The more you spread things out (over days, months, years) the more the story becomes a ‘montage’ rather than an actual story.
But then you look at another recent short story sale, The Third Parent, and that one spans five years, pausing in time, occasionally, to focus on a particularly gnarly experience with the story’s monster.
I will say this – unique scary monsters and twist endings appear to be good starting points if you want to sell anything to Hollywood, in screenplays or short stories.
Now, as for this particular story, was it any good? I’d say that, overall, yes, it was solid. The twist is fun. And I liked that we didn’t waste any time once she arrived at the house going through this whole “re-initiation” experience. You kinda have to do that sort of thing in the movie version of this. But when you’re trying to get people to turn the page, you gotta keep the story moving. And Cote does. We get RIGHT INTO IT with the brother telling her that they know she’s not Mikayla.
But there are all these little niggles that get in the way of this being much better. Spoilers abound. The dad is the bad guy here. But the writer never sets him up once. I’ll see writers do this thing where, especially with a short story, they don’t want to create any obvious suspects. With so few pages, they don’t want to risk the smart reader sussing things out.
But guess what? That’s your job as a mystery writer – to set up the eventual bad guy without the reader catching on. So for the dad to be his daughter’s captor came out of nowhere.
Also, we’re not clear at first WHY the dad did what he did. Questions are raised in the reddit thread and Joe Cote (acting as if this is a real-life story via /nosleep rules) explains that the dad had been terrified of his daughter running off with this college dude and no longer having control over her life – so he locked her in this secret backyard underground dungeon room to keep her here.
I mean…. That makes sense for six months. Maybe even a year. But ten years???? She’s 28 now and he’s still afraid to let her go out and live her life? I’m not saying that that scenario is impossible to buy into. But it’s such a stretch that it needs more explanation on the dad’s end. The dad has to be batshit crazy and we need to see that so that this ending makes sense.
Well, we know why FROM A STORY PERSPECTIVE. We need the twist ending of Real Mikayla being burned alive underneath the gazebo. But you can’t just make things happen in your story cause you want them to happen. THEY HAVE TO MAKE SENSE. So I would’ve liked a better explanation for that decision there.
Despite all this, I understand why this sold. It’s a cheap production with a marketable component (cold case) and a twist ending. Those SELL. They sell because they’re cheap to make and easy to market.
Read the short story yourself here!
[ ] What the hell did I just read?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: You have to get your stuff out there! Think about it. Joe Cote could’ve easily decided, “Ehh, what’s the point? No one’s going to read it or care,” and not posted this. If he had done that, there’d be no sale. No movie. No future romance with Sydney Sweeney. It’s easy to not get your stuff out there. But there is literally zero upside to doing so. I want one of you guys to have the next big fun script/story sale. So let’s go!
