12/03/17

Pitching. Maybe you don’t care about baseball (quite neutral myself), but if you’re a writer, you should at least take a look at any of the pitcher’s usually key guys on the field. They are supposed to dictate the game - they throw the ball, i.e. they pitch, and if the guy with the bat misses, good for them, if they hit it, it is usually not that good for him.

    In writing it is more or less the same, but other way around. You send your pitch, and the business, journal, newspaper, site, whoever, they are actually supposed to hit it. So good luck!

    In essence though, pitching your writing is like throwing a coin into a wishing well. And her comes the music connection again. This time you can make your pick  between Terence Trent D’Arby’s “Wishing Well”, or the one Free did early in the Seventies. Nothing against D’Arby, quite good actually, but in this case I would prefer Free. Much more to do with hitting.

    But then, how do you get to the point that that coin you throw in into that wishing well of your idea and/or text getting accepted is not wasted?

    Simple. A lot of work. And no matter how ordinary that sounds, that is what it boils down to. Some would insist on the original idea. Yes, but those don’t come everyday. When they do, even a relatively basic explanation will do the trick. 

    But usually they don’t. So what then? The idea has to be a good (an even bigger simplification), but it has to be researched and developed to the tee. When you put it down on paper, all the basics for the finished text have to be there.
    
     If you don’t get all the key elements from it what the finished text will look like and what it has to say, don’t even send it in. Actually, your pitch should probably take more time and effort to develop than the full text itself. 

    Frankly, that should have as much to do with the people looking at your pitch as with you, Because a waste pitch will be a wasted coin thrown into a wishing well of hope your writing will be published and reworded, no matter which way (hopefully many). You certainly already know that the wasted time and effort are probably worth a few more coins than just the first one thrown in.

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