What's the Pitch?

This is good advice from the Storytellers Unplugged:

I was at some author event the other night and doing the chat thing with people at the pre-dinner cocktail party and found myself in conversation with an aspiring author who had just finished a book, and naturally I asked, “What’s your book about?”

And she said – “Oh, I can’t really describe it in a few sentences– there’s just so much going on in it.”

WRONG ANSWER.

The time to know what your book is about is before you start it, and you damn well better know what it’s about by the time it’s finished and people, like, oh, you know - agents and editors, are asking you what it’s about.

And here’s another tip – when people ask you what your book is about, the answer is not “War” or “Love” or “Betrayal” or “Zombies”, even though your book might be about one or all of those things. Those words don’t distinguish YOUR book from any of the millions of books about those things.

When people ask you what your book is about, what they are really asking is – “What’s the premise?” In other words, “What’s the story line in one easily understandable sentence?”

The elevator pitch is a well-worn technique in almost any circumstance, but it's particularly useful in the arts. If you can't explain what you're doing, or what you're working on in a sentence or two, then you probably don't actually understand it well enough to make it a success. All you have is a cloud of ideas buzzing around your head but you haven't yet found the essence of the problem, haven't gotten down deep enough.

What finding the premise does is allow you to sell the story, and reinforce that essence (that thing that makes it different and therefore better than everything else out there). This what they do in Mad Men when Don Draper has one of his eureka moments and is able to relate products to our innermost desires and do so in single line of advertising copy.