how to turn a paragraph into a pitch

and a comp royal family into a comp crown

in this article, we’re going to cut something from “you might as well add a sentence and call it backcover copy” into “that’s a pitch.”

first, the comps:

four-part comp crowns are not only rare, they’re unnecessary, so already i’m hunting for a title to cut. i’d love to use the nietzsche (spell that quickly twice and win a prize) because it’s tiny, but a good editor can make anything fit. and speaking of anything:

the shorter of these options is 430 characters. already i see bits to slice off, but we don’t need a scalpel here. we don’t need a hatchet, either.

we need a wood chipper.

fortunately, identifying the operative parts of the 430-character pitch is easy:

that image is a little confusing. the sentence we’re deleting is the one that starts “there.” it’s interesting, but it’s not the main plot.

that is the main plot. and we’re now down from 430 to 169. i think we’ve lost a bit of the sense of family strife, but i want to sit on that for a bit and get to some easy chopping, so let’s get back to the comp crown. here it is again, as a reminder:

a bit of work — comps can be hard to cut unless you have an acronym or you drop a comp itself — shaves a bit:

let’s use the longest one (i love a good flex) and ratchet up the can’t decide tension:

on second read, that looks a little vague — is the trauma something they suffer on the show or in life? so i go:

at this point, i’d consult the writer and see if the pitch was missing anything. my main concern is she’ll go “do we need to be more obvious about him being dead?”

now, about that longer pitch:

i don’t think we need this, mostly. it presents the same concepts, but with detail that doesn’t help us (“self-discovery rollercoaster” diffuses tension from the family members debating). the only wrinkle is rebirth, which to me is a reason to go back to the first pitch and either excise bloat or change the comp crown. the problem is that we don’t know why rebirth would be bad.

a few things to note generally:

1. settings are fun, but all they do is put characters in situations. focus on the characters. so after we open with the setting, we focus on the characters.
2. verbs. reach, save, confront, bickering. i wanted to verb trauma, but my sense of the plot is that “traumatize” doesn’t quite fit.
3. does anyone miss the therapist in the shorter pitch? or would that character diffuse tension from the family-versus-felix-and-we-don’t-care-about-trauma focus? i don’t doubt that in the book, the therapist is a device to exacerbate emotional responses, but a tight space already has that emotion.

if i were to work another pitch for this book, i’d want it to present things from a different angle or use a different structure, such as a list.

now, the comp royal family: i don’t know ove or clockwork orange, but three titles and a setting in one crown is more than you need. any of the other crowns works well, and remember: in a twitter pitch event, you can comp anything. (queries work differently.) so if you want a ton, do that, but consider whether you should be spending so many characters telling everyone your book is like something famous or spending those characters showing what makes your book distinct.

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