TikTok Creators Talk Screenwriting Contest and Building a TV Community Through Social Media
Illustration by Ashley Feng | Logo by @HiHoSilverWorks
After a week of correspondence, I was finally able to sit down with TikTokers Daejah and Momo to discuss their TikTok competition that they created. Not only are they both busy with their jobs and school, but they also run their successful TikTok accounts amassing a combined total of 200K+ following and nearly 12 million likes.
I also have a busy life, and my reprieve from daily trials and tribulations is the revenge sleep-procrastination time that I spend on TikTok. I get my daily dose of thoughtful introspections on the things that matter in life: queer-coded characters, Avatar: the Last Airbender hot takes, and Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hijinks.
These are all topics that Momo, Daejah and the other three judges/founders of the “Choose Your Own Adventure” contest (@chinforshort, @downwiththemouse, @theafternoonspecial, and @a.j.lastname) cover on their personal accounts. After gaining sizable followings on their own with content that posed interesting questions and performed deep dives into character analysis,, Daejah and Momo became mutuals on the platform. With a shared passion for television writing, they created the CYOA Screenwriting contest.
The competition, which now boasts over 4,000 followers on TikTok, is exactly as it sounds: every cycle, the judging panel picks a show or concept that participants will write an episode for, within the challenge guidelines. In the first cycle, Summer 2021, the task was to write a genre-bent Spiderman pilot where participants were allowed to decide who ‘Spiderman’ was and create the hero's journey however they desired. From police procedurals to romantic comedies, the winning script of this cycle was a pilot in the spaghetti western genre. Evidently, CYOA gives a lot of creative wiggle room to encourage writing in all forms in all genres.
“Our main focus was making it accessible to writers of all levels,” said Momo, “and we did have some ideas of what we would see with [the Spiderman cycle] but we were surprised. And, the winner had never written a script before!”
“They had this idea that they were passionate about, and they clearly loved the character,” said Daejah, “so they wrote it and the script ended up being amazing.”
The ability for someone new to screenwriting to be recognized for their script was undoubtedly made possible by Daejah and Momo’s efforts in the online space. Whereas the traditional industry tends to be exclusive and elusive, there is no barrier to enter social media communities that are fostered by shared passions and interests.
The social media and television landscape are inextricably intertwined as not only two primary forms of entertainment for the past decade, but also as mediums that inform and adjust to one another. Take the Gossip Girl reboot, for example. While the original series had the illustrious Gossip Girl dishing out secrets on her blog, the 2021 version will be using Instagram as the gossip platform of choice. With 43% of American women using the social media platform and 67% of users being between the ages of 18 and 24 years old, Instagram was undoubtedly the right place for the newer Gossip Girl to spread rumors and reel in the target audience. TikTok itself has made a huge name for itself in the past two years by amassing nearly 100 million users and becoming the most downloaded app in the Apple app store.
In this way, CYOA has used the power of the internet to connect writers with community and opportunity. The current cycle of CYOA is called “#TheCrossoverEvent” and is an exercise in creating the classic TV crossover episode, but with shows you might not ever consider to go together like the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Bob’s Burgers, or Glee and Ben 10. Some of the titles are even plucked directly from the “For You” page like The Backyardigans and iCarly.
“I was just thinking about the times that I was truly truly happy,” said Momo about picking the titles. “I was thinking back to things like the ‘Jimmy Timmy Power Hour.’”
If you need any more convincing to start writing, you should know that running this contest has inspired Momo to start writing more scripts herself. Daejah, who desires to be a showrunner one day, has also been inspired to try her hand in the academic field and nurture many writers to come.
You can stay up to date with the current cycle of CYOA on their TikTok account and discover/read about the winners when they are announced through fellow indie publisher, Grain of Salt Magazine.