Story Pitch Marathon: Writing & Pitching 12 Stories in 12 Months
A Shared Struggle For Screenwriters & Storytellers
“The marathon is not really about the marathon, it’s about the shared struggle. And it’s not only the marathon but the training.” — Bill Buffum
The Pitch Marathon
This is not your average how-to-write-better article.
This is an invitation to join me on a creative journey through 2023 where each month:
- we will unleash our writing skills and create compelling story ideas
- we will polish one of these ideas, write a pitch paper, and send it to production companies, agents, or publishers.
- we will enjoy a shared struggle to find good material, promising markets, and exciting people to read our work
- and we’ll be in good company to evaluate the feedback
The mission is to generate interest in our stories and eventually get hired to write an exposé or treatment based on our pitch.
The method is straightforward: consistently analyzing the market, generating story ideas, writing pitches, and getting people to read them!
If you’re jumping back at this point thinking “Nah, I can’t do that! I’ve only just begun to pursue writing.” Then you’ll have to try harder because that’s a lame excuse.
The Rewards
I’ve been working in the entertainment industry for a while, and believe me, producers are always looking for original stories to bring to life, and your ideas could be just what they’re looking for. From visual media to games to the audiobook market, there are so many ways to bring your story ideas to the table these days that we even have to use some sort of curation process when selecting our media and genres each month (see our plan below).
However, no matter what, we will accomplish these goals along the way:
- honing our writing skills
- learn ideation techniques, storytelling principles & self-marketing
- build a network to leverage later (giving us an edge in the world of entertainment)
- gather material
- get in touch with other writers
- leaving our comfort zone
The Pitch Marathon Course
So without further ado, here’s the plan, based on which we’ll write a story pitch each month:
- We analyze the market.
- We pick a genre.
- We improve idea generation and look at techniques for structural groundwork.
- We write the story as a pitch paper (loglines, synopsis, story & character arcs, etc.) and get feedback from other writers.
- We customize the pitch based on our market analysis and select the best possible contacts.
- We send it out & repeat.
I’ll be posting about it regularly on Medium and sharing my insights each month on what I think are the most important skills and techniques:
- Analyzing different story markets
- Researching in-demand genres and formats
- Ideation techniques and storytelling fundamentals
- Writing loglines, story synopsis, character descriptions
- Writing pitch papers, and supportive scenes & dialogue
- Polishing & customizing pitch papers
- Strategies for self-marketing, communication, and basic legal aspects
Ready to take your writing to the next level and join me on this journey?
Then feel free to follow my Medium account and make sure you bookmark this post as it will be constantly updated with links to our progress.
There is also a Substack which will feature more of my work related to this year’s Pitch Marathon.
I’m looking forward to seeing what we can achieve! 💪 🚀
