Complex Numbers

Pitch Perfect

Today's article is from 2018, but still relevant.

     The Art of the Elevator Pitch  

Now, this is Harvard Business Review, so the focus of the article is... well... business. But the metaphor they use relates to writing:

Long before your favorite movie made it to a theater near you, it was presented in a pitch meeting. Hollywood screenwriters typically get three to five minutes to propose an idea, but it takes only around 45 seconds for producers to know if they want to invest. Specifically, producers are listening for a logline: one or two sentences that explain what the movie is about. If there is no logline, more often than not, there is no sale.

I suspect most of us knew that, at least in basic form. The article doesn't explain this, but it's called an "elevator pitch" because the idea is, you find yourself in an elevator with, I dunno, say, Kevin Feige. You've got your perfect screenplay for Squirrel Girl written (or mostly written) and you really want to sell him the script so she can finally join the Avengers. The elevator ride is maybe a minute long, and you have that long to convince him that a) your screenplay is awesome and b) Squirrel Girl is the perfect character for an MCU movie. (Point 2 should be blindingly obvious to everyone, but, at the very least, point 1 is necessary.)

The great thing about the name is that it's a pun on "elevate," as in, it has the potential to elevate your idea into reality.

Like I said, the thrust of the article is using the elevator pitch to promote your business or product, but publishing is a business, and your writing is a product. And even if, like me, you're not actively trying to sell your writing to a publisher or producer, distilling the essence of your plot down to a couple of sentences is a great writing exercise in itself. You can even do it before your writing project begins; that can keep you on track. Source: me, who's done it.

(The fact that this resulted in a final product that was nothing like the elevator pitch is a me problem, not a pitch problem.)

Alternatively, write a first draft, then the pitch, then keep the pitch in mind when revising.

If you can answer in one compelling sentence, you can hook your audience. According to molecular biologist John Medina of the University of Washington School of Medicine, the human brain craves meaning before details.

I would add that most humans crave emotional connection before logic. This is something to remember when creating a pitch.

In Hollywood cinema, one of the greatest loglines of all time belongs to the iconic thriller that kept kids out of the ocean during the summer of 1975:

A police chief, with a phobia for open water, battles a gigantic shark with an appetite for swimmers and boat captains, in spite of a greedy town council who demands that the beach stay open.

Note the emotional charge of some of those words: phobia, shark, appetite, greedy, demands.

A logline should be easy to say and easy to remember. As an exercise, challenge yourself to keep it under 140 characters, short enough to post on the old version of Twitter (before the platform allowed 280 characters per tweet).

Really wish they hadn't brought Twatter into the discussion. In fairness, this was four years before Musk, but I already despised the platform then.

Identify one thing you want your audience to remember. Steve Jobs was a genius at identifying the one thing he wanted us to remember about a new product. In 2001 it was that the original iPod allowed you to carry “1,000 songs in your pocket.” In 2008 it was that the MacBook Air was “the world’s thinnest notebook.” Apple still uses this strategy today.

Steve Jobs was a genius, period. Massive cocknugget, sure, but genius.

If you can’t communicate your pitch in one short sentence, don’t give up. Sometimes the language will come to you immediately, other times it might take more practice. Be patient.

It's possible to spend more time creating a good pitch than it takes to write a first draft. But it could make the difference between people wanting to read your shit and... well... not.