Ink-Stained Scribe

How I Wrote a 35-Word Pitch

My cheap-o self-made cover
I follow a pair of blogs that have both recently hosted 35 word pitch contests (YAtopia and Brenda Drake Writes). I entered both contests with different works and got requests on both, and perhaps the most useful facet of the contest was learning to whittle my pitch down to the most important aspects of the story. Doing that forced me not only to think critically about the writing itself, but also find the moment in my story that defines the main character's critical choice.
A side-effect of focusing the conflict was that I realized, for my novel-length work, that the story needs to shift closer to the end, putting that moment of critical choice dead-center, with the inciting event of the story nearer to the one-quarter mark.
Crystallizing an entire novel is hard, because you need character, motivation, setting, conflict, stakes, and voice. In this post, I'm going to show you how I got my pitch for The Mark of Flight down to 35 words.

The blurb that follows is what I've used in my query letter, and what you'll find on the Mark of Flight page above.
The council’s preference for her tractable cousin is Princess Arianna’s biggest worry until her most trusted companion, Markmaster Tashda, kidnaps her to rekindle the centuries-long war with the neighboring kingdom, Centoren. In a fight for her liberty and the preservation of her homeland, Arianna is willing to sacrifice almost anything, but she can't escape an elite squadron of Centoreinian soldiers on her own.
A backwoods Mage and a stuttering stable boy, however, are the last champions she would have asked for. Bay is an Innate Mage who can escape neither the impulse to heal the ravaged borderlands nor the haunting absence of the master who taught him more Magic than anyone else seems to know. Even worse is Shiro, a slave illegally owned by the same inn harboring Tashda’s men. Horrified at the thought of slavery in her kingdom, Arianna swears to stop the unlawful trade if she can ever get home, and promises Shiro will never suffer chains again. Then one of Tashda’s men catches up to them, and the glittering shield that bursts from Shiro’s hand shocks even him with the impossible: the slave is a Markmaster.
Bay departs to lead Tashda astray and Shiro, unable to explain how he got a Mark, refuses to accept his power. Arianna hopes that returning to the castle will solve their problems, but when Shiro is captured protecting her from slave-traders, she faces a choice: break her promise to Shiro and rush home to prepare her kingdom for war, or risk her life to free the Markmaster-slave who gave up everything to save her.
Kind of long, right? At 263 words, this blurb is pushing it even for a query letter. However, we can see all the elements of story I listed above.

 Character: Princess Arianna


Motivation: liberty and preservation of her homeland


Setting: Rizellen (which, by the fact that she's a princess, we can assume is both feudal and medieval)


Conflict: she has to choose between warning her homeland of approaching war and breaking her promise to Shiro


Stakes: war for her kingdom if she fails to warn them, and life as a slave for Shiro if she fails to rescue him. On both ends, her personal failure to protect what she cares about is evident.


Voice: words like "suffer" "rush" "backwoods" "champion" "ravaged" and "rekindle" hint at the diction of a high fantasy.

 The first step was to identify the moment that encapsulates my character's most pivotal choice--the moment she gets off her lazy arse and makes the decision to start DOING something about the situation I stuck her in. For THE MARK OF FLIGHT, that was the moment where Arianna makes her choice between going home to warn her country about Tashda's plans, or rescuing Shiro from slave-traders.

 With that in mind, I yanked the final lines from my blurb:
when Shiro is captured protecting her from slave-traders, she faces a choice: break her promise to Shiro and rush home to prepare her kingdom for war, or risk her life to free the Markmaster-slave who gave up everything to save her
By itself, that line is 41 words - already over my limit - so I needed to trim down. Shiro being captured by slave-traders can sort of be implied in the last line: "free the Markmaster-slave". It's probably not necessary to know that he needs to be freed from slavery for a second time. So I end up with this:
(Arianna) faces a choice: break her promise to Shiro and rush home to prepare her kingdom for war, or risk her life to free the Markmaster-slave who gave up everything to save her
Now we're talking. At 33 words, I was finally under the limit. But it wasn't ready yet. I knew I'd have to introduce the main character, the setting, and the general predicament she's in before that choice would matter to anyone.

 So we would obviously need to know Arianna's name, the fact that she's a princess, and the fact that she's been kidnapped; "Kidnapped Princess Arianna" covers that in three words, but doesn't really set up the action well. So I decided to use the inciting incident (her kidnapping) as a springboard. "When Princess Arianna of Rizellen is kidnapped..."

 But then what? What happens? What are the stakes of that? Easy: war. I loved the word "rekindle" from the original query, so I changed it around a bit to show the stakes of the original situation: "When Princess Arianna's kidnapping threatens to rekindle war..."

 Now her choice is properly set up, so I trimmed down the verbage at the end and came up with:
When Princess Arianna’s kidnapping threatens to rekindle war, she must choose between warning her kingdom of the enemy’s approach or risking her life to help the slave who gave his freedom to rescue her.
34 words! Awesome. But I still wasn't done yet.


If beta readers are critical for your book, they're even more critical for your query, and even more important for your pitch. You want to present it to them and see what works, what's understandable, what isn't understandable, and what might be confusing. Also, beta readers will be able to give you quick tips on things like diction and voice.

 I copied my pitch and pasted it into my status on facebook, and asked my friends to critique it.

 The first thing to go was the "must choose between ...ing and ...ing". That construction was weak, and got replaced with "must choose: warn ...risk..."
When Princess Arianna’s kidnapping threatens to rekindlewar, she must make a choice: warn her kingdom of the enemy’s approach or riskher life to help the slave who gave his freedom to rescue her.
Exactly 35 words, and much stronger. Then another friend suggested I use  the word "sacrifice" instead of "gave", which is a much better word-choice, and I decided I liked "faces a difficult choice" better than "must make a choice". In the end, I came up with:
When Princess Arianna's kidnapping threatens to rekindle war, she faces a difficult choice: warn her kingdom of the enemy's approach or risk her life to help the slave who sacrificed his freedom to rescue her.
Yeah, it leaves out a lot. It leaves out Bay entirely, leaves out the promise Arianna made, leaves out the fact that Shiro is secretly a Markmaster (and what that is). But here's the thing: those are details. Those are trappings of the world. They're not necessary in a pitch, which is designed to present the most interesting part of the story to the potential agents.

 POST YOUR 35-WORD PITCHES BELOW!

 Do you have a pitch for your story? Have you participated in any pitch contests? Do you think you could whittle down your pitch to 35 words?

The Bookkeeper (Flash Fiction)



(artist unknown) The Poet
The night my grandfather disappeared, the R.B. burned Coraline Library to the ground, and since then, I haven't spoken a word of my own. When I started talking at the age of two, my mother cried in relief because she thought I didn't have the gift.

But she'd been wrong.

I only know this because she wrote it down. Places, faces, images, sounds: they don't stay with me long. There's no room for them there, in among the words. Creak, dunk, thrush, fit. Affable, shrapnel, firebrand, tor. Tickertape snatches of things once thought and recorded, inked on paper, branded, bound, and handed down; they have stamped themselves on the inside of my skull, the permanent impressions of steel typewriter bars going click, click, click.

"I cannot live without books." Thomas Jefferson.

I wish that were so for me, because I can't speak without them. I have a million lines reeling through my head like newspapers dashing through machinery, flashing ink-stained underskirts in the stamping-dance of the printing press. Ah, that paper maiden. Corporeal, no--but constructed of a billion words. She is knowledge and ideas. A literal, lingual muse.

It would be one thing to die without reading a chapter of some non-reality--to be unable to measure your own life's sorrow against the imaginings of what could or might be. Torture, to be certain, for humans are creatures that thrive by measuring and comparing, sharing and communicating--if we can't do this, then we do not know how to live. If we can't find the edges of what we know to be normal, we can't expand and dream beyond. Without information, we do not know how to be human.

Without words, we are powerless.

Which is why my gift is also a curse.

*****

This was originally intended as an opening for a longer piece, which I've decided--for the moment--not to write. I liked the beginning, and I thought it stood on its own as a concept, if not a story.

Magical Motivation

It's no secret that I'm a huge fan of the Magical Words blog. I've been following them since last winter, ever since I decided to get "serious" about my own blogging. Their blog posts (and comments, and responses to comments) provide an endless source of "aha!" moments and motivation for me. I was even lucky enough to meet a number of them at StellarCon this year, and the lovely (and awesomely bedecked in cool jewelry) Faith Hunter shuffled a copy of their book Magical Words: A Writer's Companion into my hand for review.

Wait, what? You don't know Magical Words? Well, then allow me to introduce the main characters of this blog post:

(click for exposition)

David B Coe (aka D.B. Jackson)
Faith Hunter (aka a lot of things)


It's been a few hectic months of earthquakes, tornadoes, and moving house since I got the book at StellarCon, but eking out time to read it has not proved difficult. First of all, this book comes endorsed by Orson Scott Card himself, and you can just about hear the man's sigh of relief in the printed words - he's not alone in trying to teach the sea of would-be genre authors how to write!

With Edmund Schubert's forward about "price tags" in fiction and AJ Hartley's essay on High Concept leading off the pack, I knew within a few pages that I was going to need highlighters. Yes, it's a signed book. I even got a super-special copy with the title page printed upside-down (the only one!), which we deemed the "collecter's copy", and I'm pretty sure the smudge on the top is relic of one of Misty Massey's chocolate-chip cookies. And I highlighted it!?


Hell yes, I did.

Books about writing are plentiful. Writing advice - good or bad - is easy to find, and part of what makes this book so valuable to me is that Magical Words offers advice for writing genre fiction. That isn't to say every essay has to do with creating magic systems, effectively using genre tropes, and whether the Kessel run should take the Falcon eight or nine parsecs--far from it. Most of the essays deal with skills, techniques, and problems faced by writers of all genres: character creation, motivation, and development; world-building at all depths and levels; and all manner of best-practices applicable to writing fiction that doesn't suck. Especially the bits about it being okay to suck before you're any good.

What sets Magical Words apart from other books on writing, however, is the fact that nearly every essay goes back to practical application in genre fiction. From the worlds of Jane Yellowrock, Mad Kestrel, the Blood of the Southlands trilogy, and many others, the authors of Magical Words show us how they applied the lessons to their own fiction, or how they struggled to make the discoveries they now share. Everything goes back to applying writing techniques to genre fiction. Unlike the college writing professors who sneer at the mention of magic, or the more literary books on writing that simply don't mention other genres exist, Magical Words dives joyfully into the way these tools of the craft apply to speculative fiction, and how we can harness them like dark wizards harness the power of the innocents, bending them to our will to make greater the worlds over which we reign.

MWAHAHAhahahaa...ha...no? Fine. Bad analogy. I guess I'll have to go back and reread the essay on metaphors and similes.

Another bit about this book that I think is really great is that a good number of the comments from the original posts were lifted from the blog and printed after the essay as a sort of dialog. The discussions that arise in the comments are part of what makes the blog itself valuable, especially when one of the other authors expands, disagrees, or provides an alternate perspective on the topic. In the book, it does double duty by reinforcing the oft-cited claim: "there is no one right way". It also provides us aspiring writers a peek at the way we should be analyzing other writers' advice, which is an important skill as there is a lot of advice out there and a lot of it is conflicting.

Another benefits of reading about writing, for me anyway, is that it always inspires me to write. Something about those little "aha!" moments gives me the motivation to get over whatever hurdle I've set in my own way. The other day I was worrying about HELLHOUND and how I could make the tension more apparent, and a well-timed post on MW set me to thinking about Helena's desires, and whether any of them conflict with each other. Aha! There's that little missing screw that was holding up the entire machine. My main character's own conflicting desires should work directly against whatever is happening. If there's magic, the tension should come from her desire to escape that life and find her own humanity. If she's hanging out with her roommates, the tension should come from her desire to protect her pack and her friends, which she must do by learning the magic that makes her not belong. Those desires conflict with each other rather directly.

If you scroll back through my blog, you'll see a lot of my posts start with "So I was reading the Magical Words blog today, and..." There's a reason for that, my friends.

I encourage you to check out the Magical Words blog and add to the comments. I've never had a comment go unanswered, and part of what makes me love these guys is the fact that they give so much of their time to the readers of the blog. Now, you could sift through the years of posts and comments to find all the posts in the book, but I encourage you to buy the book. Highlight it. These guys write this blog pro bono, and a look at any one of these posts will show you how much work they put into bringing the wisdom-of-the-published to aspiring genre fiction writers like you and me.

Kids, this book is only $6 on Kindle. Shoo! Go! Purchase! You won't be sorry!

For a little taste of what the MW crew is like, check out this interview with Kalayna Price (the chick on the far right, who is often a guest-contributor to MW, and whose wardrobe rocks my face off), recorded last weekend at ConCarolinas! Yeah, I was moving that weekend, but I was there in spirit. Possibly the spirit of Edmund's shirt...



Other frequent guest contributors to the MW blog:
Lucienne Diver
Mindy Klasky

INTERACT: Are you a MW reader? What blogs or books on writing have you found helpful? Does reading about writing inspire you to write? What inspires your "aha!" moments? Have you ever networked at a convention?