There’s a notion
universally acknowledged that the one thing a story must do is arouse the
listener/reader’s curiosity.
This goes triply
for a pitch. A pitch must wake up a part of the mind and have it scream, “TELL ME MORE!”
Which is precisely
what my first ever effort at pitching did not do.
(Does this 👆 wake
up your curious bone?)
My first effort
writing a story for publication was a noble failure. I had no idea what I was
doing on the publishing front. That’s the way it is when delving into a new
field.
It did get some lovely
personal responses from busy editors, so I know it was not a complete dud as
stories go. But I mis-labeled it, (a six-thousand word manuscript is not a
picture book) it was episodic, (by then, out of fashion in publishing) and the pitch was as bad as can be.
The story itself
was about the time in a five-year-old’s life when his sister is born and his
beloved grandparent dies. Things happened. Things that mattered.
But from my point
of interest, the real story was an interior coming-of age journey. The boy was a
contemplative, imaginative dreamer who wondered about the meaning of it all. To
me the real happenings were interior.
And so I came up
with a pitch that went something like this:
“In a year in
which nothing much happened, Isaac grows inwardly.”
I mean, really. Would
you ask to read the rest of it? I’m amazed at the few positive encouraging
replies I did get.
Okay. This 👆 is
what not to do. For goodness sake, there was a ghost in Isaac’s house, and the
most beloved person in his life was dying, and the new baby was taking all his
parents’ attention and...
So just remember that
a pitch has one job to do. That job is to make the recipient shout even before
the end, “I must know more!”
4 comments:
Well said, Mirka. Pitches are something I need to work on.
You definitely unsold your story with that pitch, but you learned from it. That’s what really matters.
“In a year in which nothing much happened, Isaac grows inwardly.” LOL Mirka.
When I worked as a freelance writer/editor, I had to write many query letters (AKA pitches) to get writing assignments. During a period when I lived on Maui, I belonged to a great writing group. I would read them drafts of query letters and get immediate feedback. It's how I learned to make that first paragraph more alluring. If I could get the magazine/journal editor's attention right away, I had a chance of writing the article I pitched. Yet, keep in mind that sometimes, even if your opening is less than sparkly, the editor might be interested in the topic and inquire further. No matter how well we do something or don't, in the end, it's timing that counts, not to mention whether the editor woke up on the right side of the bed that morning and didn't have a fight with spouse or children!
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