How to Write a Sweet Cover Letter

SO

you found an ad for an awesome new job!

That is convenient and great because you are

• hating on your current job
• an unemployed theatre artist
• wondering how much your liver will go for on the black market
• madd hungry

Whatever the reason, you decide to read on further:

• Will you look at that, there are qualifications that you almost-kinda meet! That’s great!
• It’s almost close to exactly what you went to school for!
• Benefits and salary and junk! YES!
• You can buy comics food with the moneys!

Sign me up!

But how?

You read on and see
Please send in your contact information, references, salary requirements, resume and
Oh.

Oh  garbage.

They require a cover letter.  That’s inconvenient annoying COMPLETELY understandable!  Packing your entire resume and personality into three paragraphs is something that will be incredibly helpful for this company to judge you off of to get to know you and your qualifications from!

Never written one? No Fret!  This handy guide will help you write a KILLER COVER LETTER!

What you’ll need:

Google
A thesaurus
Vodka or some other form of hard liquor

Step 1 – You gonna Google the crap outta that company

You’ve vaguely heard of the Blah Blah Company when you were playing a drinking game and watching NY1 at 3AM, but you’re not completely sure what they do.  Well, TGFG!

Mr. Google not only wants to help, it’s his JOB to do so!  So don’t feel like you’re being a nuisance or a problem or gonna get yelled at, just plug that sucker’s name into the search engine and you’re golden!

The magical Google machine will give you lots of information about the company, including their personal website where you can find out things like people’s names.  THEN you can take those people’s names and plug them into your FACEBOOK MACHINE and see if you have any mutual friends that owe you a favor and can put a good word in for you.  And if that doesn’t work you are way advanced at this, then you can even figure out how to find some inappropriate picture to blackmail them with.  Like this one:

That is not me.

Step 2 – LIE!

Now that you’ve gathered together all of that useless information, it’s time to cram it all into your awesome letter!  Of course you want to sell Blah Blahs, they are only the greatest thing ever and you will work your darndest to move the Blah Blah empire forward.

Here’s where the thesaurus comes in.

Your main goal in this whooooole game process is to let the company know that you think they are the greatest thing since the Youtubes, and that you will amputate your knee if you miss the opportunity to work with them.  Unfortunately, you had never even heard of Blah Blahs before this moment, so your general vocab about them might be limited and you might have to tell a few white lies and use some fancy wording.

Never write sentences like that.

There are only so many times you can use the word awesome growth in a cover letter. Companies generally don’t like awesome words that are repeated.

Don’t be afraid of the thesaurus.  Mine is a lady and she, like the Google, is here to help.  She looks like this:

Dolores The-Saurus

She sure is a sweet lady.

She will tell you that you will not only be an asset to  the company, but a benefit, hard worker, diligent human being and not only help but aid, assist, lend a hand and facilitate their growth, moving forward, spreading their wings, flying, etc.

See, the Blah Blahs are already writing themselves!

Step 3 – Celebrating

You have finished abusing the thesaurus.

You have signed it Sincerely comma and your name.

You look like this:

Here’s a drinking game for you to recover:

Every time you used a period in your cover letter, take a shot.
Every time you used a capital letter, take a shot.
And every time you used a word with a vowel, dance with a lampshade on your head.

You’re welcome.

Sincerely,

AG

#8

AG,

Thank you again for submitting You Gotta Be Kidding Us,  to this year’s We Can’t Produce That Festival.  We were shocked at the amount of money you must think we have based on the submission we received. Choosing 8 plays from over a gazillion submissions is no easy task, but it was made easier when we read your play and discovered you were out of your mind. 

We thank you for that.

A great number of the submissions were of a very cheap production cost and I am not sorry to tell you that none of your pieces have been selected on this occasion. We couldn’t do this play if we wanted to.  Hell, we couldn’t do your play if you strapped a pile of cash to a brick and threw it in our front window at:

5455 Wickamore Lane 

NY, New York 1bunchazeroes1

between Please and Thank You aves.

Your imagination is huge.
That is inconvenient for theater.

Next year try to write something that would make producing your play more manageable. Might we suggest a play about two people talking on a park bench.  Or two people talking at a bus stop.  Or two people talking at a cafe table.  You know, something predictable.  Then you might maybe have a snowball’s chance.

Maybe.

K, Thanks

Kelli Ng & Thea Terre

#7

AG

RE: Your Play

Please read while ominous music plays.

Dear AG,

Thank you for submitting No Shot in Hell for consideration in Political Crap Week 2011.

While we think it’s rather amusing you would think we would select your play in this year’s program, we appreciated getting to know and vaguely register your voice.

 Political Crap Week serves as a way to introduce you agentless drivel to Politics R Controversial Cool! Play Company and it is rumored that writers at every stage of their writing careers are included in our PC Week, but mostly those that already have a name that people would recognize. 

You may find a list of the chosen plays and playwrights below.
You may regard them as gods.
We do.

We wish you a mediocre amount of success as you continue to cry in a corner and thank you again for killing some trees by sending your play to the Politics Get Us Press R Cool! Play Company.

Sincerely,

Annita Lay & Relli Badly

THE CHOSEN ONES:

1.Falling Under Water by Maya Reputation Pro. Ceeds-Me
When Jack meets Jill, he takes her up the hill, but there is no pail of water.  A deeply allegorical view of our economy, this play is sure to make no impact on the economy whatsoever!

2. The Past Was So Much Better Than the Present by Holly Smoke A. Bluunt
Miss the 70s?  We do, too! There was some real stuff going down and they had better drugs. This play is surely to pack a punch! And also, nostalgia!

3. Guns Cause Problems by Amy Pacifist
Guns are bad.  Don’t do guns.

4. Religion Causes Issues by William Mahr
Bob is a Jesuit priest and Esther is not.  Worlds collide, explosions happen, and the very rocks of one family’s foundation threaten to crumble as they travel to the Grand Canyon.

5. Put a Feather in It! by Usa Patriot
What happens when two football teams – The Cowboys and the Indians- get together for an epic match of epic proportions? Something predictable!

6. Internets: They Ain’t Just for Da Youngin No More by Simone Oldde
When technology and theater collide, funding often happens!

7. The Most Epic Play Ever Written by Zoe Poli-Tic
Nobody else should even bother, all! This play is so off the chain, we might get arrested for even thinking about doing it!  It’s just everything ever! And it’s all done with megaphones and ECHO EFFECT! N-N-Nudity! Ripping a picture of someone political IN HALF! BURNING THE AMERICAN FLAG LIVE ON STAGE, YA’ALL! EVERYONE IS GOING TO BE OFFENDED!

Please join us for a wine* and cheese reception.

*Wine donated by my mom from Trader Joe’s.

When life gives you rejections…

….spell ’em with a G.

Once upon a time, a lonG lonG time aGo
last Wednesday,
I spelled rejection correctly.  And it made me feel like crap.

Sure, I’d tell myself all the usual LIES  words of wisdom, like:

• Ah well, that’s the way the ball bounces!
• She’s just not that into you
• Maybe next time
• At least my voice is out there
• If I started now, I could be out of scientist school by the time I’m 400
• One day it’ll be my turn

Or, to sum up: Blahblahblah comfort blahblahblah reason blah.

I was sick of  rejections staring at me from my, otherwise, empty, desolate wasteland of an inbox.   Once you read them, they really serve no other purpose, just sit there rotting.  But at the same time there’s this unwillingness to delete them with the idea they should be kept in some sort of record, chronicling my life as a “playwright”.

But what am I going to do, wallpaper my bedroom with them?

In any case, after about the 50th, something snapped.

THAT DOES IT

I exclaimed to absolutely no one,

I’M GETTING A BLOG!

So after I asked my drunk friend extensive research on the matter, I decided upon wordpress.

I imagined I was speaking directly with the President of the WordPress Corp. in signing up.  His name is Bob and he looks like that:

Intimidating yet approachable.

This is how our conversation went:

Bob: Hello and thank you for choosing WordPress, how may I help you?

Me: Uh yeah, hello, I want to start a blog?

Bob:  Name?

Me: AG

Bob: No, I mean username.

Me: OH. Rejected_Writer, please

Bob:  Sorry, all usernames have to be lower case and smashed together so they look like poorly constructed run on sentences.

Me: Oh, of course…rejectedwriter?

Bob: I’m sorry, there is already somebody by that name.

Me: writerrejected?

Bob: No

Me: igetrejected

Bob: No

Me: aufher83894%^^* YWH HRRNHWwe

Bob: Please don’t do that with your elbow

Me: rejectionrejectioniamrejectedfromeverythingeverevenwordpressdotcom

Bob: No

This went on for about a half an hour.

I was about to say EXPLETIVE IT, throw my hands in the air and go back to watching dancing dogs on youtube.  Nothing was working and Bob was glancing at his watch and sighing.

That’s when the clouds parted and the birds chirped and other signs of an inspirational epiphany happened.

Embrace the rejection. Infuse a piece of myself inside the word.

SPELL  IT WITH A G!  I exclaimed, knocking a glass of water off Bob’s desk.

No need for the theatrics, Bob said, plugging it in

I’M A PLAYWRIGHT! I shouted

Please stop

I AM A PLAYWRIGHT AND A WRITER AND NONE OF THESE SILLY LETTERS CAN TELL ME OTHERWISE!

I felt like this:But better drawn.

My point is, I wound up teaching myself something in doing that.  I felt like Mister FREAKING Rogers.

Not that misspelling a couple of words is so revolutionary; but it’s what kept me from giving up.

And it feels awesome.

Regected!

I hate rejections.

Nobody likes rejections.

Rejections make you feel like CRAP and you are a lying liar if you read that and say “Well, actually, I view receiving a rejection as a gift because that means I got my work out there” because I say that crap all the time and still  calculate the amount of time and college it would take to become a teacher whenever I get one of those gifts in the mail.

LIAR you are lying!

Just admit it.

And it doesn’t matter if it’s a  rejection from a huge application you spent hours on or that contest you vaguely remember submitting to when you were drunk, high and at work, it’s still like a paper cut to the heart.

And I don’t care how professional you are, or how thick your skin is supposed to get in this business of words- every time you submit a piece of your writing anywhere you are sending out a piece of your soul to be judged and twisted in the eyes of faceless stranger, and you would be a robot to not feel anything.

Not that robots are bad, they’re pretty cool, the point is they are unfeeling and their work is probably void of heart and spirit.

That’s a whole other discussion.

In order to better cope with rejection, I have created a faceless stranger in my mind.  He is a judgmental asshole and looks like this:

You can tell he is judgmental because he has no discernible features and that he’s an asshole because despite having no nose or ears, his glasses are not in danger of falling off his faceless face.

And this is how he reads my work:

OH HOW BLASE
I have read this before, unfair comparison to Tennessee Williams and David Mamet Anecdotal rant about how playwrights are soooo predictable!
Well, that stage direction is just IMPOSSIBLE
There is a number 0 on the first page.  Sigh.

I am a playwright, so I’ll be using fancy playwriting terms like “writing a play” or “doing theatre” or they’re not that fancy and pretty self-explanatory.  But whatever the genre, whatever the experience, rejection sucks.  So I’m going to make something else out of it.