Pitching Your Ideas

We’ve talked about the importance of pitching and about how to pitch yourself in a meeting. So how do you pitch your ideas?

It would be nice if you could get people to just listen to your idea without having to be concerned about how you come across as you pitch that idea. But that will never happen. Your idea needs to be presented with the passion you feel inside so that they can SEE it come to life. This requires you to be a bit of an actor.

If you’re now saying, “Me? An actor? No way—I’d stumble and be all nervous and forget things and make a complete fool of myself.” Well, tough. You have to do this anyway.

And that’s the only way to think about this—it’s part of being a writer. It’s part of your job to create a pitch that does your idea proud. So when you obsess about how you’ll look in the meeting, you’re thinking backwards. No one cares about you—they care about the idea. And if you have a good idea, you have to present it with everything that’s in you. You have to show them how funny/exciting/heartwarming/scary, or whatever, your idea is.

So this isn’t something you wing—you don’t just have an idea for a romantic comedy between a chorus girl and a college professor and chat about it. You plan every part of your pitch so that the romance and humor in the idea comes across.

And how do you do that? There are three things you should think about as you construct your pitch.

First, how can you make that executive fall in love with your characters? What is it about those characters that will make the executive see that an audience will care about their story?

Second, how can you make that executive fall in love with your storyline? Why will people come in droves to see this story? If it’s a road movie or a buddy comedy, what makes it different from all the other road movies or buddy comedies we’ve seen before? What makes your story unique?

Third, how can you communicate the depth of your passion for this idea? And why is it that only you can tell this story? This means that you need to get emotional about your project and how it relates to you. Have trouble getting emotional? Tough—this is a job and showing your depth of feeling for your idea is part of that job.

Finally, what about the logistics of pitching? Generally, you’ll be in a room with one or two executives. And you’ll usually pitch in the sofa corner of their office—you’ll probably be on the sofa and they’ll sit in chairs opposite you. There may be a person in the room taking notes on your pitch as well. And as they’re busy people, you need to keep the pitch short—10-15 minutes ideally. So that means you practice it and time it in advance. And ideally? You won’t use notes—you’ll have committed it to memory. If that makes you SUPER uncomfortable, have ONE notecard where you have some key phrases on it that remind you of what you want to say.

Just keep in mind that this pitch could turn into a 6-figure income for you. How much work are you willing to do for that kind of cash? So do it.

Next week we’ll wrap up our series on pitching by talking about how you pitch a studio their own idea.

Copyright © Diane Lake

20May18

Email Diane a question to Diane@DianeLake.com