Writing Prompt Monday #1: The One-Sentence Pitch

What is a one-sentence pitch?

Have you ever noticed how movie trailers seem to follow a certain formula?

"In a world where Bad Thing/Person does Bad Things, one Hero-Figure will have to Accomplish Difficult Task... or die trying."

"Normal McNormalson just wanted Normal Thing, but when Surprising Thing happened, he discovered that all that really matters is Deep Thing."

"(Creepy whispers.) This Person, Place, or Thing seemed like the perfect Person, Place, or Thing... until Horrors of Unnamed Horrificness happened. (Loud music, shrieking, children's laughter, music box.)"

These movie trailer voice-overs may be tired and predictable, but they're actually a great example of a super-important concept in writing: the OSP, or one-sentence pitch.

Why Do I Need One?

Imagine this highly improbable scenario: you are going about your life, lifing along, when one day, a well-dressed man gets into an elevator with you.

"Hi," the well-dressed man says. "How are you doing today?"
"I'm doing alright," you say, dragging yourself out of your writerly blanket of social anxiety, because manners. "How are you?"
"I'm just on my way to a meeting in this building," he says. "I'm a literary agent representing (your genre), and we just lost a writer. I'm here to talk to someone we're hoping to represent."

Your mouth goes dry.
Your heart rate skyrockets.
You wonder if you're dreaming, since this is a highly improbable scenario.

"I'm actually a writer in that genre," you say, and are shocked and impressed to hear how ridiculously close to normal you manage to sound.
"Really?" The agent's eyes light up. "What's your latest project?"
"Uhh..." You stutter. "Well, it's like-- there's this princess, only really she's a boy, but he doesn't know that until book two. But really what you need to know is, there's this magic orb with a beacon... no, first: there was this evil wizard, ok, and he was in love with the princess-boy's aunt--"

Ding.

The elevator opens, the agent gives you a pitying, wary look, and disembarks. And as the doors close on your opportunity (and the elevator), you sag against the wall of the elevator, and with tears in your eyes, you whisper, "I should have listened to Emily..."

Ok, so maybe that's not very likely to happen.

You know what is super-likely to happen? Great-Aunt Margo cornering you at dinner next Thanksgiving.

"So you want to be a writer? Hmph. What's your book about? And when are you getting a real job?"

And trust me, the look Aunt Margo will give you after your blither-fest will be just as withering as any imaginary literary agent.

And while you may not meet agents in person, you will be in contact with them, via query letter-- which is basically just an extension of the OSP.

So this shizz is important, ok?

Putting it Into Practice Step 1: Minimize Your MC

Saying that it's not easy to condense years of thought and hundreds of thousands of words into one sentence is a massive understatement. It is t-u-f-f. But we didn't get into this writing gig because it was easy. We did it because if we didn't write, the mind-demons would roast our brains like marshmallows over the fires of sheer insanity.

Like this, but in mental Hell.

So as writers, we're no strangers to difficult things. This is just one more.

The first step is to take your main character. Remember how you spent all that time crafting that character, making them 3-dimensional, ensuring that they were more than a flat, empty archetype that could be summed up in a few words? Great. Now do the opposite of that. Find a way to describe them in two or three words. Please note that if this feels flat, shallow, and thoroughly inadequate, you're doing it right.

If you're stuck for how to do this, I recommend reading the backs of some... DVD cases. I bet you thought I was going to say books, didn't you? Well, I tend to loathe the way book-backs describe the main character. They're almost always wrong in some way. In fact, I think I may do a whole post shaming terrible book-back descriptions in the future. For now, though, I've pulled some DVDs off my shelf to give you examples of how the main characters are summed up.

"A small-town waitress with big dreams" -- Jenna, Waitress

"A successful morning show producer" -- Abby, The Ugly Truth

"Beautiful restaurant owner" -- Amanda, Simply Irresistible

"A recently widowed architect" -- Bob, Return to Me

(Ok, I can feel you judging my DVD collection, but the joke's on you-- they're my roommate's DVDs.)

(And anyway, Waitress is really good, so go suck a rock)

Step 2: Condense Your Conflict

Remember your inciting incident? That moment when your character's normal life got turned upside-down? That moment needs to go into your sentence.  So your sentence may look like this:

"When (2-3 word description of your character) discovers (discovery)..."

or

"(Description) never expected (whatever happened), but..."

Or something totally different, but that's the general idea.

Step 3: State the Stakes

Your character is fighting for something-- to gain what he wants, and avoid what he fears. These are the stakes of your story, and they need to go into your pitch.

"Everyman Everybody never expected to be Radically Altered-- but now it seems his New Ability is the only thing standing between him and Fate of Mankind."

Whether your character is fighting to save her bakery from foreclosure, or rescue his love from a dragon, or get xir rights recognized, they care about something. The character matters, because without them, the bad outcome, whatever that might be, is inevitable. 

Step 4: Pepper in Personality

This last step is where this tedious and frustrating  exercise  becomes an art form (and please feel free to read "art form" here as "horrible form of torture that will assure you of your own lowliness." At least, that's what it did to me).

Is your story a contemporary comedy? Historical thriller? Paranormal romance? Steampunk-horror-zombie-manual? Well, that needs to go into the one-sentence pitch, but you usually can't just come out and say it. The setting and tone of your book should come through in your pitch, just through your choice of the right words.

And it's really hard.

To show you what I mean, allow me to demonstrate with my own one-sentence pitch. I have worked on this for months, and it is still so far from done that I sometimes wish it was a material thing, so I could throw it against the wall.

My pitch: When an eighteen-year-old thief just trying to survive finds herself joining a revolution, she discovers something much bigger than the corrupt government controlling the fate of the last human city on Earth.

As you can see, I have not mastered this, myself. My OSP is really rough, and also not that accurate-- it's more a pitch of the whole series, rather than the first book. It's a work in progress.

My challenge to you, today, is to pick a project you're working on, or have worked on in the past, and write a one-sentence pitch for it. Or, if you find it easier, write an OSP for a book or movie you are familiar with. Write your pitch in the comments below! You never know when you'll take an elevator ride that will make you glad you practiced.