[jwplayer config=”Internal” mediaid=”1539″]
Hello. This is Elizabeth Stark in the Book Writing World. Welcome to Drafting, Week 5. Today we are going to talk about how to use your pitch to guide and inspire your writing.
The pieces of your pitch provide a concise outline of your story. It can change, of course, in the process of writing, but if you find yourself flailing, you can go back to your pitch and use it to regain your footing. It tells you who your book is about, what kind of trouble they are in, what kinds of solutions they attempt and something else about what further trouble arises.
Let’s break it down. Who are the central characters in your pitch? In what ways can you bring them to life in your drafting? How do they struggle? In what ways does their behavior change, and how can you show this as you move from scene to scene?
Drafting is also a way of burrowing into and opening up your pitch. What’s underneath that pithy statement of character and conflict? Who is fighting and over what? Write down some scenes and images of the various stages of those fights.
Your pitch gives a sense of what’s going to happen in your book, and this gives you strong clues to your set-up: your set-up establishes the way things were before the changes and then builds in what happens to create the changes. This gives you meaty action to delve into in your writing.
If you are improvising scenes from imagination or memory, your pitch will keep you focused or help you find commonalities and clear connections between various stories and moments.
You can even create mini-pitches for each chapter or each scene. Think of these as little “mission statements” that will remind you of the kernel of that section. Likewise, you can look at the arcs–story and character–in each scene or chapter. All of these will fit–like Russian dolls–inside the larger but similar shape of your pitch.
Some of the clarity that marks finished books simply is not available until you’ve drafted your first round. “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” quipped E.M. Forster. Exactly! But if you are the kind of person (as I am!) who relishes a sense of direction, however misguided, you can make use of your pitch and the other elements of your planning that create a framework to guide your unfolding story and inspire your writing.