Recently, for reasons that aren’t important here, I found myself at the Cartoon Art Museum in San Francisco with a gaggle of third-graders (a gaggle is six, if you’re unfamiliar with the imperial system of measurement). One of the most interesting items I saw there was Neil Gaiman’s original pitch to DC for Sandman. And yes, if you’re wondering who goes to the cartoon museum and gets excited about the pages with no drawings on them, that would be me.
Anyway, that made me start thinking about pitches in general and why so many of them are terrible. It’s true, and the simple reason is because authors are so wrapped up in their story, the world they’ve been living in for months or even years, that they can no longer articulate it quickly for anyone else. I think it was in Save the Cat! that the author described pitching screenplay ideas to strangers in line at coffee shops. If their eyes didn’t glaze over after 30 seconds, he knew he had a decent story. This is a great approach if you’re kicking around ideas and haven’t written anything yet.
If you’ve already written your masterpiece and are now trying to get it read by agents, publishers, or anyone other than your mom or your spouse, you need a slightly different approach. It’s fun, it won’t take much effort, and you might discover something about your story that you never knew before. Instead of the standard breathless paragraph embedded in a query letter, try to tell your story in a different format, preferably one with very strict rules.
My personal favorite is the 12-bar blues method, but you can also go with villanelle or sonnet, anything that makes you fit your ideas into a box with a new shape. I like the blues format because the lyrics have a lot of repetition, which can help simplify a complex story, or possibly add nuance to a simple one. Here’s a fine example of the AAB lyric structure, brought to you by the North Mississippi Allstars, who you should be listening to anyway.
[vimeo=http://www.vimeo.com/39640318]
How is this going to make your pitch better? Well, like the coffee-shop method, if you can’t sell yourself your idea using a formal structure, chances are no one else is going to get it either, and that’s usually because there’s a flaw in your story somewhere. You don’t have a solid plot, or you have too many subplots, or you’re not entirely sure who your characters are or what they want. If your story easily flows into a formal poem or song structure, it’s going to translate in any medium. I don’t recommend sending your final pitch to prospective agents in this format, but your ultimate presentation will be stronger for the process, and you may be able to save yourself a lot of revision time with the next project if you create a pitch first.
Give it a try. If you’re feeling noncommittal, by which I mean lazy, use the poetry magnets on your fridge and make a haiku out of your story instead. We all have them. Mine happen to be lolcat magnets, but anything works.