"bare necessity" by devi laskar
Let’s talk pitch.
It what you “do” when you’re trying to get an agent or editor’s attention regarding your finished book. You know what I’m talking about, the book you spent years on, perfecting, and now’s it’s ready to be read by the world and what’s more, embraced.
In the Book Writing World, Elizabeth has spent some time with the members in the mentoring and “finish your book” classes working on making our pitches, well, perfect. Ideally, your pitch should be 2-3 sentences in length, contain some elements of conflict and most importantly, have a suspenseful “hook” – a tease of what’s to come.
Mine: “The novel, The Shadow Gardens, is about Mrs. Lahiri, an American born Bengali woman grappling with the problems of race and identity. Mrs. Lahiri has tenuously arranged everything in her life, her home and relationships with her family – and she has carefully hidden the past in plain view. Now that she wants to host her daughter’s wedding in her own prized garden, the past races into the present and threatens to ruin the picture-perfect life Mrs. Lahiri has created, forcing her to choose what matters most: the truth or tradition.”
What is your pitch? What are the questions that are burning up the pages in your book? What is most important question to you as the writer that needs to be answered?
Thanks for your piece on story (character,motivation and obstacles) Am not sure if this is the place to respond but here goes.
Here are some pitches I wrote for Murder in the Rehab Unit.
Clarissa Parks is invested in preserving a safe environment for patients at the Del Norte Rehab Facility. She starts by investigating who killed Tom Young.
Clarissa Parks has a good sense of what’s right and wrong and works hard to establish justice around the murder of Tom Young, a patient at Del Norte.
Clarissa Parks faces many challenges as a nurse but her greatest challenge is to uncover who killed Tom Young, a patient who was killed on her shift.
I agree with you on Lahiri’s characters, even tghouh I love Lahiri’s prose. I gobbled up The Namesake. But I was disappointed with Gogol/Nikhil’s own confusion over his name, and the narrator’s confusion over it, as well. Does Gogol/Nikhil himself prefer Gogol , or not?The narrator clearly prefers Gogol, since he/she refers to him by that name throughout, even after he legally changes it. Gogol/Nikhil has clear affection for his original name, since he never insists upon Nikhil, even after he legally becomes Nikhil. Why the confusion? Both names are western, so it’s hard to see either of them as a symbol of his Indian heritage. For me, this confusion marrs the story, since it leaves Gogol/Nikhil himself vague as a character. All of the female characters are more better defined, less ambiguous.