pitch dark (with a flashlight!)

In a serendipitous synchronicity, Agent Kristin Nelson posted about “the movie pitch” on the same day that my local RWA chapter had a long email-loop discussion about “the elevator pitch” in preparation for the STAR conference in Cocoa Beach this weekend.

(We interrupt this blog for an important reminder: Diana is speaking at the STAR conference on career planning after the first sale. She’s going to be dressed very well, possibly in knee high suede boots, have a worksheet to hand out, and will be rather sheepish and self-deprecating about the fact that she is speaking from more of a academic and field research perspective than from first-hand experience.)

If you’re a writer, and you’ve spent any significant amount of time with me where pitching is going on, you will have heard my rant and will therefore know how much I despise the so-called “movie pitch,” and Kristin basically nails the reasons why. (The movie pitch, for the uninitiated, consists of the writer describing her project as X Movie meets Y Movie, and is supposedly supposed to be all high concept.) The problem, as we see it, with this method is that when it doesn’t work, it’s positively horrific. You never want a potential agent or editor blinking at you from across the conference hall table and saying, “Sorry, I’ve never heard of Random Harvest/Primer/The Slingshot/The Price of Milk and I have no idea how in the world Bambi meets Brazil.” It’s not a pretty scene, and I’ve seen it… um, too often.

Don’t get me wrong, if you’ve got a property that positively SCREAMS for the movie pitch, then have at it; I’ve always thought Shanna Swendson’s “Bridget Jones meets Harry Potter” was a rather brilliant description for Enchanted Inc., and “Clueless Goes to Harvard” a perfect encapsulation of Legally Blonde. *However* for every one of these, I’ve seen a dozen people trying to shoehorn their story into an “X meets Y” style pitch that doesn’t suit at all. I’ve sat in a room where everyone with a highlander romance invoked the name of Braveheart. Even if their story had nothing to do with being at war with the British! And additional problem that was once pointed out by my agent is that if the person you are pitching to hated the movie you use, you aren’t going to get very far by describing your book as a spin on that story. They will be thinking about their reaction to it, rather than whatever element you think resembles your own tale.

The way I see it is, if your book is perfectly described as the meeting of two high concept, very popular, much-beloved stories, then fine. If you just think it’s a cool way to describe a book and you want to try it, run, don’t walk in another direction.

Okay, that’s out of the way. Now onto the “elevator pitch,” so named because it’s the pitch you give if you happen to be standing in an elevator with an industry person and they say to you, “So, what do you write?” A few sentences are all the time you have before that little bell goes off and there you are on the mezzanine.

By the way, pitching doesn’t stop when you sell your book. Every time someone finds out I have a book coming out, they ask me what it’s about. And I give them the elevator pitch.

The biggest problem I see with the way people craft their pitches, is that they don’t focus on what the story is actually about. They go on and on about large, vague concepts — things I’d like to think fall under the heading of “theme” like “love conquers all.”Other people spend a long time talking about their characters’ backstory or their lovingly crafted settings and never get to the meat of the matter. Another pitfall is making your pitch sound like a teaser, like something you’d hear in that booming masculine voice at the beginning of a movie trailer, before you are introduced to the plucky heroine and the brave hero. You know what I’m talking about: “In a time of war, only one man can save the day…” “She needs a man, but he was the last person she was looking for…”

Do you know how silly that sounds in response to the question, “What is your book about?” We aren’t looking for taglines or teasers, we’re looking for the quick and dirty description of your characters and plot — what they call in the movie business, “a logline.” And that’s what’s really going to interest someone about the story.

To compare it to something else, if you were doing an “elevator pitch” for Star Wars, you *could* say:

“The galaxy is in the clutches of an evil empire that is using a massive technology that has the poswer to destroy whole planets, like the pretty garden planet of Alderran and the desert world of Tatooine and the frozen fjords of Hoth, and a small, ragtag band of rebels are the only ones that can stop it.”

OR you could say,

“A young farmhand, a cynical but good-hearted smuggler, and a retired old soldier with a secret past rescue a whipsmart captive princess from the clutches of an evil intergalactic empire and are swept into the heart of a rebellion, where the young farmhand becomes a powerful warrior with an important destiny.”

To me, the second one is interesting, because it focuses on the characters and how they interract with the plot. The editor immediately starts seeing specific scenes in her head — wow, that smuggler and that princess are going to go at it hammer and tongs, huh? And I wonder if the soldier’s secret past has anything to do with the farmhand’s destiny? Evil empires, ragtag rebellions, and sweeping alien vistas are a dime a dozen, but this one really looks like it’s going to have some fascinating characters that play out the storyline.

The movie Titanic was about a big boat sinking, and that’s great, but the reason people kept going to see it again and again and again (especially if they were teenage girls) is that there’s also this really sweet love story going on while the boat sinks. The elevator pitch for that story would be something along the lines of, “a talented artist from steerage and a rich debutante about to be trapped into an arranged marriage fall in love while aboard the Titanic.” If you were writing this story, and someone asked you what you were writing about, and you said, “About the Titanic,” then they’d nod and be like, “Yeah, it sinks, right?” And if you said, “about a doomed love affair that crosses class boundaries,” they’d say, “when? where? how?” It doesn’t tell them anything.

When I give my elevator pitch about Secret Society Girl, I don’t ever say, “Oh, it’s a book about secret societies.” Chances are, they’ve already read The Da Vinci Code, so if I said that, they’d file it under “full up on secret societies for now.” Instead, I say “It’s about a normal, modern Ivy League co-ed who joins a centuries-old secret society and turns its archaic traditions upside down.” I focus on the character, and how she interacts with the high concept of secret societies.

And you don’t need a high-concept story to do this. Let’s take an example of what is generally considered to be a “low concept” story, or a character study: the movie Stepmom. It’s not an action film, it doesn’t have a host of huge set pieces, and there are a lot of complex relationships going on in that film. But find the throughline of what it’s about: “a strong-willed single mother of two with terminal cancer clashes wits with her ex-husband’s young and sassy, but good-hearted, new wife, while coming to accept the fact that her rival will eventually raise her beloved children.” If this were your novel, you’d say, “I’m writing a women’s fiction novel about…” and then add in that bit above.

On thing that I’ve heard bandied about is watching the one or two line TV guide descriptions of movies. That gives you a good idea of what you are going for.

Anyone want to practice their elevator pitch?