Must be something in the air…

‘Cause everyone’s talking about pitching…

Agent Kristin Nelson tries to prove that you can write a perfect query letter while only detailing what happens in the first 20 pages of a book here. And is immediately besieged by naysayers who don’t really get the point — do not get bogged down with trying to include EVERYTHING. Tossing in a mention of a Quidditch match is just adding detail on the subject of “being a wizard.”

It’s much more interesting to say “Quidditch match” and get the agent to go, “how curious, what in the world is Quidditch?” than it is to say “magical stuff” just as it’s more interesting to say “nightclubs of the damned, where deadish strippers flaunt their insides for the drooling masses” than to say “zombie stuff”. Which reminds me…

The folks at Fangs Fur Fey talk about their query letters that worked here (and all week — I’m Sunday).

I once held a pitching workshop on Romance Divas (sorry, you’re going to have to dig for that yourself — it was an Author of the Month workshop), and I read a lot of pitches that week. The biggest problem I saw was a lack of specificity. The second biggest problem, interestingly enough, was getting so bogged down in detail (the wrong details) that you missed the big picture of the story.

Clear as mud? (If not, read Carrie Ryan’s post on the topic, here.)

You have to strike a balance in your pitches between showing the big picture of the story and also, not being generic.

Let’s take as an example, the film Working Girl. Great film. Totally high concept. How would you pitch it?

Too generic:
A girl from a working class background will do whatever it takes to make it in the executive NYC business world. Life isn’t fair for Tess McGill. All she does is work hard and try to improve herself and get a better job, but it seems like you can’t get a ahead by playing by the rules that other people set up. Finally, one day, she decides that she’s had enough and she’s not going to follow the straight and narrow anymore, which leads her to big adventure and maybe even love.

Losing the big picture:
A secretary from Staten Island takes a lot of night school classes because she wants to get a promotion, but because she has a smart mouth and doesn’t want to put up with the sexual overtones she gets from her misogynistic bosses, she keeps losing her secretarial jobs, and her boyfriend only buys her lingerie and doesn’t seem to have the same ambitions as her. When she wants to talk about work, he’s just worried that the pizza they ordered will get cold. Things get worse one day when she arrives home late to discover that her slimy boyfriend has been sleeping with a hometown girl whose ambitions aren’t as big…. (and on and on, and we haven’t even met Sigourney yet!)

How about a little of each?
Tess McGill, a smart mouth secretary from Staten Island hopes her new female boss will be the business mentor she’s dreamed of. But when the boss is injured and must take a leave of absence, Tess discovers the cutthroat executive has been stealing her ideas and decides to break a few rules herself. She pretends to be an executive and launches a major business deal with Jack Trainer, one of her boss’s associates, a devastatingly handsome corporate type who is as intrigued by the financial potential of Tess’s proposal as he is by her highly unorthodox (and sexy) approach.

Which one do you like best?