Mini Writing Lesson: Writing a Pitch featuring Meet Cute Diary and In the Way of All Flesh! (Patreon)

This week, you'll all be turning in a pitch for your story. And a pitch can be pretty tough to write! You have to pack a lot of your story into a few words.  Fortunately, you can easily find a lot of great examples of pitches out there...a lot of the descriptions ('blurbs') you see on the websites of booksellers online follow the classic structure of a pitch! Granted, they're usually a little lengthier, but let's take at your pitch assignment. For the pitch, you're supposed to explore the main conflict of the story, include some of the major events and indicate the overall emotional journey of the story and explain where your story fits as far as genre/subgenre goes. Now, let's look at the blurb for Meet Cute Diary by Emery Lee.

Felix Ever After meets Becky Albertalli in this swoon-worthy, heartfelt rom-com about how a transgender teen’s first love challenges his ideas about perfect relationships.

Noah Ramirez thinks he’s an expert on romance. He has to be for his popular blog, the Meet Cute Diary, a collection of trans happily ever afters. There’s just one problem—all the stories are fake. What started as the fantasies of a trans boy afraid to step out of the closet has grown into a beacon of hope for trans readers across the globe.

When a troll exposes the blog as fiction, Noah’s world unravels. The only way to save the Diary is to convince everyone that the stories are true, but he doesn’t have any proof. Then Drew walks into Noah’s life, and the pieces fall into place: Drew is willing to fake-date Noah to save the Diary. But when Noah’s feelings grow beyond their staged romance, he realizes that dating in real life isn’t quite the same as finding love on the page.

The only thing missing from this that would make it a 'pitch' is the title. The first line tells us what genre the story is- though it doesn't directly say young adult, the mention of a teen protagonist and the comparison to other successful YA titles tell us that this is YA (and it also indicates the general tone. I should mention that when you actually start writing full queries to agents or publishers, it's sometimes a good idea to do these comparisons (called 'comps') so the editor can get a good idea of the tone of this story. You're not required to do that for this assignment though, you can just directly state the genre.) The line also directly mentions that this is a rom-com.

We also get the main conflict of the story- Noah is fake-dating to save his website from getting exposed as fiction, but he starts to fall in love for real, which makes things messy. And the summary tells us Noah's emotional journey. He starts pretending to have more knowledge of love than he does, but struggles with real feelings.

For a more direct example of a pitch, here's the one I actually sent to the publishers of my own novel:

In the Way of All Flesh is a young adult romance with a dark fantasy twist, full of thrills, chills, and yearning.

Gloomy teenager Manee Srikwan wears long sleeves and keeps her hands to herself for a good reason–whenever she touches a person for the first time, she sees a vision of how they will die. Manee’s weird powers cause those around her nothing but misery and she’s long resigned herself to a life of loneliness. But her vivacious classmate, Stephanie Pierce, changes all that.

As the girls grow closer, Manee’s feelings for Stephanie blossom into love. She yearns to be more intimate but is anxious about breaking her all-important “hands-off ” rule. When she finally gives in to temptation, she sees a terrifying future where Stephanie is murdered — and Manee is her killer! Now Manee has a choice to make— will she fight this fate or let it rule her?

(You may note this is also a little bit longer than 100 words. Though it's good to try to keep your pitch as close to 100 as possible to practice being concise, I won't penalize you for going a bit over. Just keep it close to 150 and definitely under 200).

So, let's look at my pitch. I include the central conflict for both the romance and my main character- Manee's going to murder the one she loves! We also have major events (meeting her love interest, falling in love, giving into temptation and seeing a terrible vision) and we can clearly see Manee's emotional journey. She starts of closed-off and resigned to loneliness, Stephanie gets her to open up, and that eventually leads her a crossroads where she has to decide if she will defy fate for the sake of love.

I also indicate my genre directly as a young adult fantasy romance (I have also said urban fantasy or paranormal- in a few queries I called it "magical realism"...sometimes genre can be hard to pin down for a first time author).

[..]

Next week, we'll be discussing the important topic of diversity in the romance genre and do a journal entry on research!