Sunday, March 29, 2009

Getting Ready for April's Pitching Clinic

We're going to do a pitching clinic in April. To get ready for this, some of you might want to take a look at what we did last year with practice pitching. As with all things on this blog, it happened more or less organically *cough*by accident*cough*. I posted a dusty old article of mine called Parsing and Pitching, and several people used the method to try to create a pitch.

Then we broke five of them down. Each of these posts contains additional information about pitching.

Pitch #1 describes the physical aspects of pitching from my side of the table, including the arctic climates in pitching rooms and the way that the "speed dating" approach can impact how I hear what you say.

Pitch #2 used a difficult-to-pitch project to show why clarity is so important.

Pitch #3 expanded on the concept of clarity by reassembling a pitch to make it easier to hear.

Pitch #4 was a pop quiz. We let the commenters try their hand at receiving the pitch and thinking about what questions they would ask the author during a live pitch.

Then we did a post about the nature and purpose of questions during a pitch.

And finally, Pitch #5 pulled it all together. Commenters gave a thumb up or down on a practice pitch, and were asked to identify the pitch detail that led to their decision.

In April, we will also take practice pitches, but we're going to start with a lesson in how to craft a log line pitch. Get your hooks ready, because fishing season is about to begin!

Theresa

4 comments:

Riley Murphy said...

Sounds like a lot of fun Theresa! And this time I'm going to be ready.;D

Chris Eldin said...

YAY!!!

I will look for this!
:-)

Chris Eldin said...

OOOO! May I ask something?

If someone sends you a sample query (Or a real one from me. ahem), would you be able to prune it to a pitch?

(Back off, everyone else. I am first in line here, and am not afraid of using my wide gerth.)
:-)


Okay, okay....

But I am definitely looking forward to this!!! I've never been able to write one for my own manuscripts.

Edittorrent said...

Chris, my aim is to give you some tools for writing pitches. If you look at the Parsing & Pitching article, that might give you some help, too.

We're going to do some exercises together, and even if you don't end up with a finished pitch, you should end up with the foundation for one.

So let's do that before we start anything else. :)

Theresa