A messy pitch is a pitch that won't sell

Hello friends, happy June! I hope you’re leaning hard into the warm weather and are planning to take some time off to relax and recharge. It’s summer! Go outside! Throw your laptop in a river! (Or just take a walk in the park with your pet, idk, whatever works.)

Today I want to talk about something that frequently trips up freelancers but that, with a little self-editing, is easily avoided: making pitches more complicated than they have to be.

This is a super common — and easy — trap to fall into. We sometimes think that cramming as much information as possible into a pitch will strengthen it and give the editor more useful background to evaluate the idea. Sometimes that’s true! But it’s usually not. Most of the time it leads to those winding, meandering pitches we’ve all written that veer totally off course because they’re trying to do everything all at once. It happens! We get excited about the story and internalize it after doing all that pre-reporting, so it really can seem like every aspect of it is crucial information.

This is only natural! But usually not the smoothest path to a commission. The strongest pitches are those that condense all that info and detail into a tight, super-digestible, no-fluff pitch that has only what it absolutely needs and nothing else. (As should be the guiding principle for any type of writing.)

I talked about this a while back in a newsletter about self-editing, but there are a few ideas I want to expand on.

First, this isn’t a matter of just cutting down the length or word count of a pitch. As I always say in workshops, don’t get hung up on a word count. There’s a world of difference between cutting stuff to get under a word count cap and cutting out the chaff. A lot of bad advice about pitching out there zeroes in on length as a defining metric or decision-making factor, but that misses the whole point of why we want to keep tightening pitches (or, again, any writing). We want to eliminate unnecessary details and information to clarify and home in on the central focus of the idea, not just cut words for the sake of getting that word count down.

(Just to be clear, I’m not disparaging the art of trimming down a story. As an editor, it’s a core part of my whole job. I’m more trying to shift how we think about trimming from, “I have to lose X number of words,” to, “I have to ensure every word in this piece of writing is necessary and serves a purpose, otherwise it’s gone.”)

Diving a little deeper, when I say simple I don’t mean oversimplified, obvious, or dumbed down. Rather, think of it as distilling the sometimes complex and technical facets of a story — say, a narrative, a dataset, or detailed guidance — down to their most basic and most comprehensible forms. Sometimes that really is a matter of just cutting unnecessary words, but sometimes it’s fully rewriting the concept or even fundamentally rethinking how you understand and approach it. What that looks like in practice will vary for every pitch, but this way of thinking is a good foundation.

Typically, to get to the point where you can distill a pitch down to its essence is a result of clearing two bars I hammer away at in pitching workshops:

1. Do you know what your story is?

2. Can you explain it to a total outsider?

Not being able to answer “yes” to both often means you haven’t done enough pre-reporting, which in turn means you probably don’t have a strong enough grasp of your idea to focus it down to plain English. Not fully understanding your story gets messy and probably means you’re making things way more complicated than necessary.

Another common sign that a pitch is too complicated is that it keeps introducing new directions instead of drilling down on your central concept. The pitch template I love to use and that I coach freelancers on aims to build the pitch linearly, going from hyper-specific and narrow to big, broad, and encompassing, all while following the same throughline. It opens with a detail or anecdote that exemplifies the story’s conceit, then keeps expanding from there along that throughline until you’ve tied together your opening detail and the larger, more abstract concepts and ideas you’re really driving at. If you find yourself writing something like, “I could also go into …,” hit pause. Sometimes that phrase is useful, but often it means you haven’t made a choice yet about what your story is and you’re stuck in the idea phase. And as we all know, editors commission stories, not ideas.

Finally, I just want to reiterate: We’re not really talking about word count here. We’re talking about all that extraneous and distracting stuff that can get your audience — the editor you’re pitching — further away from your central idea and concept, and, possibly, further away from a commission.

Basically, it comes down to this: Don’t make the editor assemble your story from a massive pile of tangentially related fragments. Just build it for them in the simplest terms you can.

Good luck out there, and let me know if I can help you sharpen a pitch!