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!”
