Writing grad Rachel Dunnet won one of this spring’s coveted Praxis Fellowships! Praxis Centre for Screenwriters holds twice-yearly competitions designed to reward and support top screenwriting talent and their projects. In Praxis’s own words: “We receive approximately 200 scripts a year. From each competition we select 4 – 6 scripts to be workshopped with a veteran story editor or screenwriter. Admission to the workshops is highly competitive.”

So, basically: yay Rachel.

And Ms. Dunnet was kind enough to grace us with some thoughts about her Fellowship experience. Here are the Top 10 Things I Learned at Praxis, by Rachel Dunnet:

1. Never trust your cell phone for daylight savings.

If you use your cell phone as an alarm clock please note that it may not automatically move ahead an hour with the rest of North America. Which may necessitate running at top speed down Richards street to only be 20 minutes late for an advising session.

2. Practice your pitching.

It’s scary selling your work in 3 minutes to a room full of peers and important strangers. It’s even scarier when you haven’t pitched the material before. Pitch your housemate, the cabbie, your mom, pitch anyone. When you get up to do the important pitch just mentally replace the producers’ faces with those of your friends or pets.

3. Listen to your advisor’s lecture.

After a great lecture by my advisor, Amnon Buchbinder, on not changing part of your script to create a non-functioning whole in the rewriting process, I did just that. Lucky me I had someone to point out the error of my ways (and probably use me as an anecdote in his next lecture).

4. Always know when there’s a free catered lunch.

Not once but twice I arrived at a function with a full stomach and there was a killer catered meal. If there’s free food to be had: be ready for it!

5. Get a business card.

Yes, they taught me this in Biz Skills at VFS and no, I haven’t gotten around to getting one yet. But I should! People really do exchange cards.

6. Don’t leave printing till the morning of.

Again, another item I dealt with many times in my year at VFS. But really, it never looks good to be 15 minutes late for a meeting because Kinko’s had a rare Saturday morning rush.

7. Network. Network. Network.

No, this doesn’t mean buying people drinks and badgering them to give you phone numbers. It does mean getting to know your fellow Praxis fellows and picking their brains. Two of the fellows were recent grads of the CFC and had great information for me on the program. Another was a seasoned journalist that gave me freelancing tips and advice on finding a literary agent.

8. Know which notes are your notes.

I got some invaluable feedback from our pitching session. Instead of picking and choosing which to take into my next outline I took all of them. More’s better, right? Wrong. Always keep in mind which notes work with the story you are trying to tell.

9. Seize the opportunity.

The Praxis fellowship is squeezed into four days leaving you little time to rewrite between advising sessions. Your seasoned advisor can give you notes and suggestions that are hard to come by on your own without doling out some serious cash. I cut myself off from friends, television and the gym so I could spend as much time as possible rewriting to get more feedback from my advisor.

10. Be confident.

When I read the bios of my fellowship peers I was struck with feelings of unworthiness. Some had scripts in development with producers, another had directed his own indie feature. But, after meeting everyone, I realized we all had the same goal and were trying to make a name for ourselves in a tough business. I also saw during the pitch session that, thanks to VFS, I had a lot of pitching experience in comparison to my peers. And that felt pretty good.

Rachel, thanks for sharing all this great advice. The rest of you writers: get working on your script! The next Fellowship deadline is June 30th.