The Pitch Paradox – less is more

There are so many skills involved in story writing – structure, plot, characterisation, dialogue, setting, consistency of tense and point of view, et cetera – that it is a wonder to me that I have ever produced anything at all. But I have completed a novel! It still needs work, but I reached ‘The End’. Then I found an opportunity to pitch it to agents and editors in 1-to-1 sessions, and discovered I had barely taken the first step in learning my craft. I now had to reduce over 70,000 words to a pitch of no more than 30, and in a way that would tempt a reader to pick up the book.

Perhaps you’d like to try it? It’s a necessary skill for any writer who wants to get published, and to be read. Either a publisher will need to be convinced the book is marketable or, if you self-publish, you will become the marketer selling to potential readers. The pitch should cover these points: who the story is about, what they want (and if possible why they want it), what will be the price of failure and what stands in their way: X wants Y (to…), otherwise Z, but… It is difficult to omit all the rich complexity, the characters, subplots and underlying themes that you have laboured over – after all, it took a whole book to explore them – but 30 words is all you have.

One piece of advice that helped me was to first work on the century-old six-word summary exercise, of which the classic example is ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn’. When I discovered my main theme could be summarised as ‘Wanted: children to rescue, remediating past’ it helped me to find my story’s key focus, with my main character’s love interest and work problems, the novel’s themes, characters and settings, all serving to flesh out the central idea.

• If you don’t have your own completed piece of writing to try this exercise with, pick up a novel you’ve read recently.
• Confession: I found this exercise very hard, and needed the help of Pens Around The World members to improve my pitch at a recent ‘text share’ meeting. This may be the hardest Writing Prompt in the PATW canon!

Image credit

Ann H via pexels.com, with thanks.