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?

Guest Post: The Best Way to Write a Trans Character

Around the YA Literary blogosphere, the current buzz is all about YA Authors being asked to straighten gay characters. Publisher's Weekly published an article by two Young Adult authors who, without naming names, revealed that they had been asked (and not just once) to remove a gay character's viewpoint, or at least all reference to his sexuality. Well, the agent stepped forward with a totally different story...You can read about the whole mess here and form your own opinion.


The positive thing about the whole mess is that it started a dialog about LGBTQ characters in fiction with all the right people. Just after responses to this started cropping up, I was hanging out with my friend Morgan--a transsexual woman--and asked her not just what she thought about the notion of "straightwashing" fiction, but of the treatment by authors, agents, editors, etc of LGBTQ (which she refers to under the umbrella-term "trans") characters in general. Also a writer, Morgan agreed to share her thoughts on the matter in a guest post.

***

The Best Way To Write A Trans Character

Morgan can be found HERE and HERE

There isn't one.

Gosh, that sounded disappointing. Let me give specificity a whirl, for giggles. There's a lot of discourse (not to mention monocourse and meta soliloquies, when no one is around) going on about how to tackle LGBT characters in fiction. Some say burn any hopes of it, because there's that background radiation of fear that says “bigoted people will use words like 'decency' as a beating stick against me.” Some caution against the flip side, where you slap in FABULOUS characters sitcom-style willy, even nilly, out of a desire to be topically hip. Or hiply topical, it's hard to keep up (or is it down?). Some say your characters should be out and proud. Some say it should be so subtle it's barely there.

This Some person sure gabs, don't they? But I've been massaging my little lesbian transsexual noodle to conjure an answer, and I don't think there is one. We're still at the 1939 stage of the next great lexicon war as we try to excise terms like hermaphrodite, tranny and transvestite. It's still news worthy when a trans character is in a television show, even moreso when they're actually played by a trans person. I would argue that it's too soon for there to be a right way. Every form of media follows its own set of rules, and almost every form of media is transgender-free, or at least trans-lite, which may be low fat but it means the knowledge fat per serving goes with it.

For instance, take trans memoir “Conundrum” by British travel writer Jan Morris. It was written in the 70's when, if you thought bloody no one was trans now, there was practically negative trans mass in the universe in that dark, bygone era. (Can you tell I'm young and cocksure? Vaginasure?) There being a dearth of edumication about L, G, B and T during her personal coming out, Jan writes her story through the lens of a spiritual rebirth rather than through the more recent socio-medical view. So instead of a story about drawing strength from a community, it's more of a story about trusting yourself even when you're a solitary anomaly. It's a radical approach time-locked to that era, and a microcosm of a community that often prefers to stay hidden.

Because a truly globally connected trans community is something only recently realized, “Conundrum” is part of a heritage of stories on gender defiance. After all, transgender isn't just transsexuals, who pursue “transition” through medical or surgical means. There's bigender and trigender, who by choice spend part of their life as a male, another as female, perhaps still another as androgynous or even as a wholly separate personality. There are crossdressers (formerly known as transvestites) who change their dress and behavior for a certain degree of emotional or sexual satisfaction, while still retaining their assigned gender's identity. There are genderqueer people who blend or cast off the window dress (and duds) of both sides of the divide but don't identify either way.

Take the Japanese animation (anime) fairy tale mind screw series, Revolutionary Girl Utena. It's about the titular Utena who longs to become a prince so she can save the princess. She wears an outfit akin to the other males in the series, she kisses the princess to release the Sword of Dios, and she's weakened into a state of submission later in the series when she forces herself to adopt "feminine" traits and roles. Is she trans? Who knows? We didn't have that precise a language back then, so there's no convenient labeling to pin. All we can say is that the show built a foundation on the corpses of subverted gender norms. We can't say that she was male-identified because that hyphenated word didn't really exist, but we can say that the series revolved around a relationship between two women with opposing social roles. And opposing shades of purple hair.

Now look at the “Sofia Lopez” episodes of Nip/Tuck season one. Here we have a transsexual character seeking surgery, and her doctor, Sean (one of the show's leads), coming to grips with his discomfort, and disgust, with people who change genders. Not that Sean has a moral leg to stand on, since he fed the literal legs Silvio stood on to an alligator three episodes before. But in a sympathetic way he releases the bonds of old guard masculinity and comes to terms with his judgmental nature, and by turn the audience learns a little more about what it means to be trans.

Color bomb pretty and fascinatingly cynical show Paradise Kiss ends with lead guy George leaving the lead gal, George's final scene showing him on a boat alongside none other than his trans best friendgirl. It's platonic love that's in the air, as the show suggests that he needs a partner in crime more than a star-crossed love. While this Casablanca-esque ending doesn't teach you much about being trans, it never has transphobic sentiments, either, instead syncing its tone to the character's. She doesn't dwell on it, and the show leaves her alone about it.

Now “Sex Changes,” by the Dresden Dolls off their album Yes, Virginia.... The song can be read as a cautionary tale about your first sexual experience (“sex changes you”), a condemnation of people who change their sex, or the exact opposite: a condemnation of the way people talk about trans people as victims of a sickness. That said, it's a razor line to walk and should only be performed by professionally calloused razor walking feet.

Finally, the American version of Ugly Betty. The first soapy season involves a trans character who is played both as evil and ethical, as shock value and as a nuanced human being. Halfway through the season she announces she's a main character's supposedly dead brother whose come back from beyond the grave to exact corporate revenge. And in the same breath, admits to faking her death just so she could transition without the scrutiny of her family and peers. She has sex at one point in the series, and it's built up as this “ooh, how different” thing, and yet she and her lover never address it. They just admire each other's beauty and don't sweat what sex with her could be viewed as. Instead they sweat the regular, prescribed amount of sex sweat.

Quiz time: which one of those was the right way to write a trans character?

All of them. The thing is, there's no right way at the moment. Any interpretation is going to cheese someone off, because the community is made of a million pie slices of various thicknesses and crust integrity. Now this may be a scary prospect, because who wants to land on the wrong side of a civil rights issue, now or in the retrospect of history? Safer to just pretend trans people don't exist, because that makes everyone happy. But the thing is, for there to be a standard, there has to be a model. Everyone of you who has even imagined writing a trans character are forging that foot path, here and now. Any interpretation not born out of judgment is going to fit one of those models above, or millions of potential others, because the big secret is out. Trans people are as varied, diverse, strange, good, bad, beautiful, manic, womanic, wild and firework-laced as everyone else.

Further Reading: Writing Gay Characters, The Top 25 Gay TV Characters, Writing a Trans Character
(Edit: 6/18/2012): Check out Zoe E. Whitten's post on the topic here: On Writing Trans Characters and YA Fiction.

***

You can find more of Morgan's writing at: TRANSLABRYNTH

And her YouTube Channel: Translabrynth on YouTube