Story pitching is not unlike relief pitching in baseball. You’re alone and everybody is looking at you and for that moment, you have the ball. You’re in control and everything hinges upon you delivering that pitch down the strike zone. 

You know the drill or you’ve pictured it in your mind a thousand times. The room, the chair, the exec who you have to impress with your latest masterpiece. 

The same exec who hears a dozen pitches before lunchtime each day. The person whose job it is to say no… something he or she does 99.9 percent of the time. 

And trust me when I say I’ve blown a pitch before. I won’t bore you with details. 

Recently, I did a major studio pitch for a project that has been years in the works… years. (as of now we’re still waiting to hear back) but we succeeded in one thing, getting the highest ranking exec in the room, in this case a division president, to tell us he would essentially “take the project upstairs” for further consideration. He complimented me more than once on a pitch I delivered well, telling me they should just videotape me giving the pitch and release that. LOL. 

Trust me when I say how well the pitch went in the room was mostly due to us having a good story but also me following the few simple rules below.

You see, when I was in the Warner Bros. Drama Writer’s Fellowship program a few years back I learned a very valuable pitch lesson. 

THEME. 

I look around and see stuff (or hear audiobook podcasts) and I feel that a lot of the time the material suffers because the writer doesn’t have a grasp on the importance of theme. 

So I was told, start with theme… and it works. When you pitch the first words out of your mouth should be “The theme of this story is… “

Next, nobody wants to hear all the details of your story no matter how cool they may seem. Your first act better establish who, what and where so quickly establish the world in which it takes place. 

This is the important part… know your act structure and don’t be afraid to vocally mark your act breaks. “Act two begins and we…” 

Next, set up the action which bookends your midpoint. Then proceed directly with the one or two key events which take you to the end of act two and then wrap up with how it all ends. 

Yes, it sounds simple and this is obviously a gross oversimplification but hopefully you get the basic idea. Know your theme and act structure well and be able to boil it all down to a couple minutes and most importantly of all, make sure in those couple of minutes you define your character arcs. But yes, be brief and if your story is solid, your pitch will be, too.