by Meghan Nesmith
No matter what stage of writing I’m currently in, I’m convinced it’s the worst.
Drafting? The blank page staring back at you, taunting you with its emptiness, the white space an endless void into which you are launching yourself with nothing to cushion your fall? The worst!
Editing? That long, slow march through the weeds, all of your pitiful sentences begging for forgiveness, all those darlings about to meet their maker? The worst!
But pitching—oh, pitching. Pitching truly is the worst.
When you’re pitching—be it a carefully crafted short story, a passionate opinion piece, or the kernel of a personal essay—it can feel like the entire publishing universe is locked to you. You’re on the outside and there’s no key in sight. Or, worse, there is a key, but all you’ve been given is this dead fish, and what are you supposed to do with a fish?
The cold, hard truth is that editors are busy. They’re working with tight deadlines and even tighter budgets. But the silver lining is this: they’re looking for you as much as you’re looking for them. They want your brilliant new story, your insightful essay. They want to introduce you to their readers. They want to work with you, to hone your work, and to develop a long-term relationship. And you have the power to make it easy for them to say yes.
While so much of the writing process is a strange brew of alchemy, daydreams, and lightning, pitching is a science. It’s the one part of the process that you can reliably crack, and once you’ve learned how, you can replicate it again and again. It’s a framework for showing editors what you can do and how you will do it, which is exactly what an editor needs: a reliable, thoughtful, and knowledgeable partner.
What I love most about teaching pitching workshops is that they invigorate. When we workshop a pitch together, unwrapping it to see how it works (and where it doesn’t), honing in on the details that make it shine, we’re actually moving a writer incrementally forward, literally pushing them across the finish line. In these workshops, we all move one step closer to the goal of sharing our work, participating in that beautiful collective moment when it stops being individual and starts being communal.
And that moment? That moment is, by far, the best.
Join Meghan on February 3rd for her morning workshop, Pitch Doula, to conquer the science of pitching your story.