Pitch, the primary part of a query

In the movie business, scripts are sold by way of the pitch. This is also a tool for writers in other genres, like creative non-fiction and fiction. The Writer's Digest Guide to Literary Agents offers this advice about the pitch — the most essential part of a query letter. And the advice is pitched with examples of movies.

When you're composing a fiction query for a novel, the pitch will be the most important part of your letter. Typically, the pitch is the second part of the query and involves "hooking" agents by quickly explaining the premise or concept of the story. Here are some tips when composing the pitch:

DO:

• Do start with a logline if you wish. Give a one-sentence description of the story to present your hook upfront, before getting into some details. "It's a story about three men facing midlife crises who decide to start a fraternity." (Old School)
• Do focus on the hook. What makes your story different? After all, we're all telling the same basic archetype stories over and over. What makes yours different? Is it Romeo & Juliet except it's a werewolf and a vampire? (That's Underworld.) Is it High Noon set in deep space? (That's Outland.)
• Do talk about publicity and platform if you are writing nonfiction.

DON'T:

• Don't let your pitch run wild. Seven sentences is pretty long. Aim for five.
• Don't spend time on the main characters or tell every character's name. If you can pitch without even saying the name of the antagonist or love interest, it's less confusing.
• Don't give away the end. Pique; do no more.
• Don't pitch agents about poetry or magazine articles.
• Don't use gimmicky stuff such as singing your pitch or presenting your pitch "in character."
• Don't pitch if the work is unfinished.
• Don't hand the agent anything. They will request more if interested, and they will give directions on how to send your sample.

GLA also takes apart a query letter that goes wrong on the GLA blog. It's worth a look to see what not to do in a pitch and query. But that next to last DON'T is important. There's no point in a pitch for a novel if the work is unfinished.

Show spunk about the sentence

Out on the Writer's Digest Web site this week, an article on grammar boils down the writing of a good sentence to four commandments. Bonnie Trenga advises us about what we should, and more often should not, do:

1. You shall not write passively.
2. You shall not overuse weak verbs like “to be” and “to have.”
3. You shall not fluff.
4. You shall make every word necessary.

They are so fundamental that we need to know them like our own faces in order to cast them off. See, breaking rules is part of writing, too. You're working inside rules like these four to be polite, so readers don't struggle to enjoy your writing.

A list of rules, though, can become a rutted road for a reader. You might have this experience if you watch TV on the reality channels and see one episode after another of house flipping shows. The hopeful but innocent flipper introduced. The stern advice from the host. The headstrong ignoring of said advice. The cheerful praise of finished flip work from Realtors, followed by grim assessments from the buyers during the open house.

Read enough such formula and you begin to long for something that tastes different. Learning how to differ is the advice you can read more about in Spunk and Bite, a good antidote for the writer who's lashed to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.

Write something that follows these four commandments without fail. Then rewrite it so it bends, or even breaks one of the rules. See if you can create something unexpected but understandable. Know the rules, but break them when you can.

Oh, one more bit of advice: Set any intentions or guides like these in positive statements. The brain can only process affirmative statements. It throws away the word "not" or "don't." So,

1. Write in the active voice.
2. Select strong verbs to limit your use of “to be” and “to have.”
3. Choose the best word, the one understood easily and most accurate.
4. And yes, "You shall make every word necessary."

Too old to be published?

One of the diligent and professional writers in my manuscript groups shared advice from Writer's Digest about getting published after age 50. Some people don't have the time or resources to turn to a full time career of writing until they get older. WD's advice seemed to run adrift, to me, once I read the article.

Yes, it's good to see Writer's Digest, which makes its living off of giving advice to us writers, is addressing this topic. Some of the advice seems to apply no matter how old the author is making the query, so it's useful — to a point.

But saying you're retired in a query letter is not so far away from being a retired detective, like the successful romance science fiction novelist Linnea Sinclair. She says in a bio on her Web site that she's "a former news reporter and retired private detective." Frankly, that experience from those jobs lends credibility to her writing.

She's won the publishing derby, having published six books at Bantam and eight in all. Not at all shy about leaving another career to be a writer. But it's clear that she works at being a writer, with appearances at conferences and lots of signings.

The other part of the Writer's Digest article that twanged me was the magazine's usual vanguard of "you won't believe how old these writers were on first publication." Here's how it reads:

And if there’s any doubt that older novelists can succeed, keep this in mind. Anna Sewell didn’t sell the classic novel Black Beauty to her publisher until she was 57. Karen Blixen, the Danish author who wrote under the pen name Isak Dinesen, didn’t publish her first book until 50—and her blockbuster, Out of Africa, hit the market when she was 52. Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie series, didn’t have her first book published until she was well into her 60s. Richard Adams, author of the children’s classic Watership Down, remained unpublished until he was in his 50s.

All those WD writers published their first books in a different age. WD reminds us that older writers can sometimes overlook the fact that publishing is a business. Well, the work of these four authors succeeded in a very different business era for publishing.

Sewell's Black Beauty published in 1877
Ingalls' Little House published in 1935
Blixen's Out of Africa published in 1937
Adams' Watership Down published in 1972

Ya know, there wasn't even cable TV in 1972, or TV at all during Blixen's and Ingalls' successes. Sewell published her one and only book before there was radio.

Of all the advice from Writer's Digest in the article, being enthusiastic about self-promoting and making it clear you're not a one-shot-wonder seem to make best sense.

Write a good book. That's what matters the most. The agent who's going to represent it best is the one who can get acquisition editors to pick up their phones or answer e-mails. If they want to know how old you are, it's a good sign that it's time to move on, in my opinion.

Acting in Hollywood is a young person's game. Telling a story well and getting behind it seems ageless.

And you thought newspapering didn't pay

From the heady canyons of the Big Apple we hear of a huge buyout for an icon of a reporter. Okay, you may not have heard of Linda Greenhouse, but she's been writing at the New York Times since 1968 and has been on the Supreme Court beat through five presidents and eight terms, almost non-stop since 1978.

Linda got a $300,000 buyout to leave the Times, which must cut 100 staff jobs and offered generous buyouts to get the ball rolling.

This took 35 years to earn, so you could argue that she's had an $8,500 a year pension growing. Pretty good for newspapering that started in the 1970s. But the buyout is all about newspapers contracting their staffs, especially the top writers. Linda's had the most durable tenure as a reporter covering the most important court in the US for one of the most important papers. There's no glass ceiling on this job for this woman.

In the terrific New York Observer article about her departure, Linda was asked what her favorite Supreme Court story has been. It's probably not a surprise that it came on the night the court decided who would be President, for the first time in the history of America:

On that fateful December night in 2000, when Bush v. Gore was decided, Ms. Greenhouse waited patiently in line in the Supreme Court press room all day. At a little after 10 p.m., when copies of the decision were finally handed out, she grabbed her copy and headed straight for a cab. Back at 229 West 43rd Street no one could make sense of it and TV reporters had already started announcing that Gore was victorious and a recount was headed back to Florida.

The Supreme Court didn’t offer the handy guide that it normally does—the decision wasn’t signed so absent was a small summary with a vote count as it does for most decisions—so reporters were actually forced to read the thing. While on a cab to the Washington bureau, Joseph Lelyveld had an open phone line for her and said, “We’re confused over here. Can you make sense of this?”

She had read a few paragraphs and it was pretty clear, even if the fine details weren’t.

“It’s obvious—it’s 5-4, it’s over, Bush wins.”

“Okay,” he said back. “You have 10 minutes to write it.”

And now, she's got $300,000 to her credit for all those years or writing "literature in a hurry," as they call journalism. She also wrote a book, Becoming Justice Blackmun: Harry Blackmun's Supreme Court Journey. And at the standard 8.5 percent royalty most authors get after an agent's fee, the $15 paperback of this fine account of the Court she covered for three decades must sell 234,375 copies to equal her buyout.

A fellow has to wonder how long that kind of sell-through will take, compared to three decades of work that was paying $140,000 a year when she retired. She could make it; two of the top five current best sellers (other than the Bible) have covered George W. Bush.

Those best seller numbers don't matter to this scribe. She loves academic work, so she's headed to those ivory towers to study:

She said she wouldn't disappear when she retired and had a few things lined up, though it's mostly academic work, which she actually really loves. One piece will be for a journal named Constitutional Commentary.

"I'm not going to disappear. I'm going to keep writing and thinking and talking about Supreme Court," she said.

If you're newspapering, keeping writing those leads. It can lead to a big exit paycheck after, oh, 30 years or so.

Nine writing tools

Mostly free, these pieces of software come by way of lifehack.org. Dustin M. Wax says

Since I’ve been eating, drinking, breathing, and sleeping "writing" all week, it seemed natural to pull together some of the tools, sites, and Lifehack.org tips I know of that can help make writers more productive, organized, and creative.

If you like tools and sites to help you get creative or solve your writing challenges, check out the lifehack posting for The Ultimate Writing Productivity Resource.

It's not you, it's your books

A very funny and insightful essay of the above title is out on the New York Times Web site. I enjoyed it because it poked some fun at some towers of traditional good reads. It's also got a link to some great Web sites and literary blogs.

But at its core, the essay talks about detecting affinity for love through a reading list. Ever been to a new friend's house and looked over the bookshelves? Ever browsed a Facebook or MySpace page just to see what's in the Favorite Books section?

It's a funny read, but has insights you might already know. For example, that women read more fiction than men. Or that men are far less likely to write off a pretty woman just because she's ill-read. Then there's this, from a woman who cast off a devotee of Ayn Rand:

"I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.)