Marv Wolfman is a multi-award winning writer of comic books, animation, theme park shows and rides, children’s books, novels, television, internet animation and more.
Marv was Editor-in-Chief of Marvel Comics and Senior Editor at DC Comics where he created the acclaimed series The New Teen Titans. In 1987, Marv moved to Los Angeles where he became Comics Editor for Disney Adventures magazine.
In animation, Marv became story-editor for The Transformers, Superman and Monster Force TV shows. He and his long-time friend, Len Wein, recently sold the script for a big budget, live action super-hero movie called The Gene Pool.
This is the second in a three-part series on various ways you can improve your hitting percentage with editors.
Have you noticed that when you show your pitches to editors/producers/friends/relatives, they can’t see the potential for what you envisioned?
Remember having to explain the nature of that potential?
Remember promising them that the finished story will fulfill that potential?
Remember that look of patronizing encouragement or doubt?
Remember that you felt you (to quote Butch Cassidy) “have vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals”?
Pitches are roadmaps for where you’re going with your stories. They are also the promises of things to come.
This column is about not saving your good writing for later…but writing the most compelling pitch you possibly can, and for that you need to…
“SELL, DON’T TELL”
All writing is selling.
All of it.
Every last word.
Whether you realize it or not, through the process of writing and communicating, you’re selling ideas…and you’re selling yourself as the purveyor of those ideas.
If you’re a technical writer, you’re selling accuracy or process.
If you’re a non-fiction writer, you’re selling an interpretation of facts.
If you’re a columnist, you’re selling a perspective…just like I’m doing now.
If you’re a writer of fiction, whether the medium is comics, film, prose or plays, you’re selling your vision of what’s happening to characters that don’t exist in places you may have never been to. You’re selling us on any number of things: that a character is a sweetie or an asshole, that he or she is motivated to behave or change in a particular way, that an image or setting looks or smells or feels a specific way. And you’re selling us the idea that these things all mesh together.
You’re selling us on your vision of an ordering of events that never happened, and you want us to become completely immersed in the story and its world.
So, should the selling of your vision begin with the finished manuscript?
Obviously, it shouldn’t.
Selling—or communicating what’s important, if the word selling somehow offends you—needs to begin at the earliest possible moment that you’re trying to get somebody to read what you’ve written…or ask you to write more.
That’s the purpose of pitches, right?
I know writers pour their hearts and minds into writing pitches, and I’m not questioning their effort. However, when a publisher’s guidelines indicate that writers should deliver a one-paragraph, one-page or two-page pitch/synopsis, most of the pitches read like a laundry list of events with over-long paragraphs, run-on sentences, smaller type faces, crowded margins, and twenty-pounds of story stuffed into a two-pound bag.
“Don’t you think a pitch should tell what happens?” you say.
Yes…and no.
Your pitch is a roadmap, but it shouldn’t show every street, or the reader could make a wrong turn and get lost. The map should simply indicate the ones that will get the reader to end up where you want them to be.
When pitches are presented as packed-together sequencing of events, editors have to cull through them to find the emotional arcs of your story, and they’ve got a better-than-even chance of missing the diamonds you planted in your story’s heart.
So what are you selling, the sequencing of events…or your story?
You can’t sell both…not without a lot more space. Ultimately, that’s what the comic / film / novel / play is for.
The complete sequencing of events for your story is important, but not at the pitch stage. At this stage, you’d be surprised how little beyond the concept and the arc of the story is important.
The art to writing a pitch is remembering that your primary goal is to sell the reader on why the characters are doing what they’re doing, and that the story is evolving in a natural and compelling manner. Too much detail in a pitch obscures these larger concerns, and the reader can get lost.
You may think that these charming nuances add depth to your pitch and help sell it, but this is rarely the case. An abundance of detail throws off the perceived balance of what is and isn’t important about your story.
For example, imagine you’re in a room that’s completely empty of furniture, and there are five huge diamonds lying at different locations on the floor. They’re not too hard to see, right? Those signify the important parts of your story, the aspects that determine its uniqueness and arc.
Now, imagine you’re in the same room, and the room is three-inches deep in rubies, emeralds, sapphires and opals, along with those same five diamonds. How easily do you think you can find those diamonds now? Yep, it’s pretty hard…and there’s a really good chance that two, three or four diamonds could be missed completely.
This is what a reader has to sort through to find and identify the important aspects of your story…ultimately to determine whether they want to see a longer version.
Why make it hard on them? Why put in stuff that gets in the way?
What are you selling?
What follows is an example of the kind of over-writing I’ve seen in pitches and treatments, all because the writer couldn’t bear to leave out events he or she was certain would help sell the story.
Version #1: “Harry is fired from his job. He’s been fired a lot. He’s depressed. He trudges out of his office, takes the elevator to the ground floor, then steps out onto the street, buys a gun from a local crook, and drives home. When he sits down, he tears his pants on a chair spring, but he’s so depressed he doesn’t notice. He’s decided to commit suicide and puts the gun to his head. He pulls the trigger and is sprayed with water. The gun is a water pistol.”
Version #2: “Harry comes home from work, disgusted that he’s reached a new low and been fired after only twenty minutes on the job. He eases into his favorite chair, barely noticing the spring that thrusts at him through the upholstery and tears his pants. He contemplates what may or may not be ahead…and sees nothing. With clenched teeth, Harry picks up the pistol that he just bought from a local thug, sets it against his temple, pulls the trigger…and squeals as the pistol erupts with a squirt of water.”
The first version is flatly written, and it utilizes little in the way of voice or tone. Until we see that Harry tried to commit suicide with a water pistol, there was little in the writing that suggested this was a comedy. This is a critical mistake in a pitch, as there’s no reason for an editor to believe that the writer who wrote this could write a comedy.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a writer say, “But I’m really a good writer. Just wait and see.”
Don’t save the good writing till later. If you can write comedy, horror, superheroes, whatever, the tone of your writing in the pitch should convey this. If it doesn’t, then we can’t tell what kind of writer you are.
The first version tells the story. The second sells the story…and it sells you. It evokes the tone of the story, using language that sells it as a comedy, and it sells you as the person who can write it.
Sell, don’t tell.
Write your pitch so that the reader will have the appropriate emotional response, and you’re halfway home. Now, let’s take you the rest of the way.
The second version may have been better at evoking the tone of the story, but is that enough? It is probably fine for a treatment, but it’s not good enough for a pitch. You want to grab the reader by the throat and not let him have a chance to wiggle free.
This is where we discuss the idea that less is more.
Version #3: “Harry is a nowhere man who’s floundered in life and failed at everything he’s ever attempted, even suicide.”
Version #2 may or may not be amusing…but Version #3 is written in broad-strokes and immediately propels us into the character and his dilemma.
Let’s continue the story about poor Harry, and I’ll spare you the flatly written version: “Harry packs everything he has of value into his bag. It’s a small bag. He stands in the doorway to his bedroom, which he’s kept spotless for nobody besides his goldfish to notice—but goldfish don’t notice much, do they? He sighs. Then he walks down the hallway one last time, sighing continuously. Finally, he stands in the open front doorway to his house and closes it with an even bigger sigh. He sighs on the way to his car, and is interrupted only by his neighbor’s dog, as it manages to catch him and tear the other leg of his pants as a going-away present. Once safely inside his car, Harry turns the key in the ignition, and hears the clicking of a battery that’s nearly expired. More sighing. Harry opens his bag, takes out the Crest-encrusted toothbrush, slips it into his shirt pocket, and walks away from his bag, his car, his house and his life. He’s going to walk the sidewalks of suburbia, like Caine, in search of new failures.”
Back to the broad-strokes Version #3, which now encompasses the entire story as we know it: “Harry is a nowhere man who’s floundered in life and failed at everything he’s ever attempted, even suicide, so he leaves behind every trophy of his failure, determined to walk the sidewalks of suburbia, like Caine, in search of new failures.”
Conceptually, there’s nothing missing from the broad-strokes Version #3, so the editor / producer / relative / friend can immediately tell what’s important about the story.
They can immediately spot your diamonds on the floor.
The expanded version may be fine for a more detailed outline, which would come later in the process of story development, but when you’re trying to sell somebody on what’s compelling about your story, shorter will always be better.
Shorter is better.
Less is more.
What you’ve read about “Harry Walks Like Caine” is only the premise and inciting incident.
When this needs to be a one-page or two-page pitch, you’ll have plenty of space to tell us what happens when Harry walks the sidewalks of suburbia, like Caine.
If you use the Version #2 style of writing for a two-page pitch, you’ll quickly run out of real estate and several situations could occur.
You could end up rushing the middle and ending, and the focus of the pitch will be out of balance, with the weight all at the front.
You could run five pages too long, and then you’ll start cutting words and phrases, rather than re-conceiving the pitch as a whole, and the pitch will have a chopped-up feeling.
You could reduce the text from 12 pt. to 7 pt. type, extend the margins, delete the spaces between paragraphs, combine paragraphs, and hope the editor doesn’t notice…and I kid you not that this happens.
This is what happens when you try to fit your entire plot into too little space.
“Well, sure,” you say, “You wrote the premise, which is the easy part. Try doing that for the rest of the story!”
Sure. Here’s the entire second act (which is approximately half the story): “Not once in 237 attempts, has Harry Who Walks Like Caine successfully stopped the serial pie-thrower known as the Crazed Clown from splattering a pie company executive. However, at the scene of the last splattering at Acme Pies, he discovers a meringue-spotted driver’s license that reveals the true identity of the masked clown. The name on the license is his. Armed with this knowledge, he’s determined to stop himself, and it’s going to be a battle to the death!”
The trick to conceiving your story in broad strokes is remembering the purpose of each of your acts, and, for the sake of convenience, I’m going to only deal with the three-act structure.
Act One: Problem.
Act Two: Complication.
Act Three: Solution.
Leave out the detail and you’ll be fine. Write even one line that involves a character actually completing an action then you’re already taking your pitch into the red zone of over-complication.
Write in arcs, not in events, and you’ll clearly convey the elements that are driving your story.
This applies to defining your characters, too.
You have a pretty good idea about the nature of Harry, right? So you don’t really need to know more about him, do you? No, you don’t, not for the pitch. Save Harry’s upbringing in a circus sideshow till later.
There is a line about character motivation I learned from Robert McKee: Nobody does more than they think they need to do to get what they want.
I find this works for people, too.
Translation: People don’t extend themselves beyond what they think is necessary.
When I worked at DC Comics in the mid-‘90s, I was Group Editor of Creative Services, and I saw all the pitches that were being distributed for executive approval.
One pitch, whose writer I won’t identify, read something like this: “In this series, I’m going to keep doing what I did in the (insert character name here) mini-series.” That was it, the entire pitch, and it sold.
Why? Could it be that a popular writer wrote this pitch, and the DC Comics editorial staff knew exactly what it would be getting from him? Absolutely.
There needs to be a body of work before an editor or producer can have this degree of confidence about what they’re going to get.
If you’re writing a pitch, never presume that the person reading it is going to give you the benefit of the doubt…about anything.
Nobody’s going to believe you if you tell them you can do it, just as they’re not going to buy off on a story that simply tells what happens.
It’s your job to instill a sense of confidence, and to do that you have to sell them on your story…and yourself.
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For more information about Platinum Studios and our comics publishing program, check out our website at http://www.platinumstudios.com. If you’re interested in submitting concepts to us, please follow the directions on the “submissions” portion of our site.
