Novel - Writing the Pitch Letter

I had great plans for the week gone out.  I was in that 'focus, focus, focus' mood, the one that floats into my arena every so often and reminds me that the only way to get things done is to do them!!


But unfortunately, and I can't really work out the 'why' as yet (still submerged in my own confusion), things went badly wrong.  It was a bit like when you KNOW you are going to start a diet, you can nearly see those tiny jeans escaping from the wardrobe, and then you get on the scales 7 days later and you have gained 3 lbs. 


Well that was me, in the metaphorical sense, I will keep my real diet wars for another day.


What I did manage to end up with this week though was the infamous 'Pitch Letter'.  One thing I've learned regarding this novel writing thing, is that the challenges of the writing is one thing, but the synopsis, the pitch letter, the working out the who and the why you should send your manuscript off to, is like doing homework in a subject that you are not particularly fond of at school.  And for me, the 'Pitch Letter', turned out to be my worth nightmare.


For some reason even though I said I was going to write it, a big part of me was fighting against doing it.  I planted seeds for wild flowers in the garden, I made a list of jobs that needed doing, I watched endless hours of television about the election that has to be OVER soon, I even worked at night on things that are part of the day job, along with playing solitaire into the early hours, all in the hope of avoiding this dreaded thing (that I, not anyone else had decided to do).


I wondered was it being Irish, because we are not good at talking ourselves up and hate other people that do it about themselvea.  Or was it that secretly I thought my novel wasn't very novel at all?  The prospect of working out 'why' anyone would publish or read my book brought up all the inferiority complexes that any decent, self critical, forever doubting individual like yours truly could muster, but eventually, because, as I have had to admit in the past, I am a bit of a 'goody two shoes' when it comes to doing homework I did it, for if I said I was going to do it, then hate it or not I was bloody well going to.


One of the first things I had to do was get over was believeing in the novel, now that might not seem difficult to most people who have written 105,000 plus words, but to me it was monumental.  So in order to limit my pain, and on the principle that often less is more in a busy publisher's life, I decided to stick to a max of 300 words for the pitch letter and also because I read somewhere that one should 'make it brief, make it accurate and make it interesting', I figured I had the beginning of a plan.


So brief I could do, accuracy was also within my grasp, but making it sound interesting was kinda caught between blowing your own trumpet whilst at the same time thinking this might be a load of rubbish.  For what it's worth, I ended up with the following shape on it:


Paragraph 1
Stating the genre, with a four word depiction of what the novel was about, a bit like the famous pitch for the movie Alien  'Jaws in Space'.  I didn't use that one because remember you have to be accurate!


Paragraph 2
Expanding on the 'why' of the novel and more importantly saying 'who' would want to read it.


Paragraph 3
What makes it interesting.


Paragraph 4
Pitching how the novel would appeal to others outside the constraints of the genre.


Paragraph 5
A bit about me, sort of to hide that I might be a complete failure, you know the stuff I am talking about .........  At the age of 5 I won a race!


Paragraph 6
Rounding up after pitching my novel and little old me, by being polite with a touch of humility but not completely self-deprecating etc etc.


All in less than 300 words!


Not sure if this will be my 'Pitch Letter', in fact I am pretty sure it will be subject to a lot more editing, but even though I didn't achieve my other plans for this week, I suppose at least I've made a start!

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