Judgement Pitch

Writing is easy.

Talking is easy. 

Talking about writing is hard. 

I tried to recommend The Hunger Games to someone and I made it sound boring.  If you’ve read the trilogy, I’m sure you think it’s impossible to make dull, but any piece of work stripped of its details sounds uninspiring.  Try it.  Try to explain Harry Potter in a few sentences – you can’t touch on all the emotions, adventure and riveting fun in such a small space – if you could, book seven would have been a lot shorter.

So to pitch my own work, in sixty seconds, or worse 25 words, was so daunting a task I found myself putting it off for weeks.  When it couldn’t be avoided any longer, I spent so much energy on it I could have written another screenplay or gotten through half the edits on my next project.

Putting my work out there for others to judge, I hoped to be the proud mother of the valedictorian, and feared that I'd come across like a slightly unhinged mother from Toddlers and Tiaras.

All the advice I found online could be summed up in five words: just talk; have a conversation.  A conversation, though, suggests an equal footing.  When only one of you is being judged, that balance doesn't occur.  Pitching is more like an interview or a presentation in that it's all about making a good impression.  Unlike an interview or presentation, it doesn't come down to the preparation you did; knowing the sources and being as much of an expert as the time allowed.  For a fiction pitch, you're not being judged on your level of preparation, you're being judged on your ability to create a spark.

Like trying to pick up a guy, you can straighten your hair, you can put on mascara and your favorite perfume, but at the end of the day there has to be something intriguing about you that makes the person want to know more.  You need a spark that will result in the exchange of phone numbers, or in a pitch’s case email addresses.  As in dating, if you try to fabricate something, the chemistry will fizzle and you’ll be told that they already have a similar project from another client – the equivalent of being told that they have a girlfriend (but let’s face it, if they were that crazy about that project/girlfriend they wouldn’t be looking around, would they?)  So after all that energy that I used to come up with the best words to describe my work, I discovered that while the advice to have a conversation is sound, the most important thing is to just be yourself… 

But it doesn't hurt to have a really good opening line.