Perfect Pitch

Original Post: 8/7/2015

During the Christmas season when my daughter was 12 years old, her piano teacher discovered a gift in Annie that I could not distinguish. My daughter, she said, had the gift of perfect pitch. For the next 10 years Annie honed her musical craft through voice lessons, piano lessons and ultimately a degree in music.

My own pitch is something I have struggled with since beginning a writing project 4 years ago. During the writing of He Asked Her To Dance I tried to develop my elevator speech. I often thought that the ride better be a long one in order for me to tell the story. When asked what my book was about, I struggled to keep it short and professional. I know now that I was too close to the project. So when I completed it, I distanced myself from it, let it rest, mourned the lack of interplay with the characters and worked on other things.

In preparation for the Antioch Writers Workshop recently, I brushed off the manuscript for review with a group of peers and a facilitator.  Ann Weisgarber encouraged me to name it as historical fiction. I'd never given myself license to call it that, even though I did extensive research about the 1950s, which is the time period of the story. Historical fiction felt right and spurred the further thought to identify all of the themes that may appear in the 310 pages. 

I used a list of themes to determine which ones resonated with me and the project. Then I used a series of stars to assign to each one that applied to my manuscript. For example: Love and sacrifice got 5 stars. Will to survive also received 5 stars. Four star themes were disillusionment and dreams, female roles and motherhood. Faith versus doubt and death's inevitability both received 3 stars. 

From these identified themes I developed a 112-word pitch to present to any agent, but particularly to the agent who visited the workshop. I practiced the pitch on friends and signed up for my 8 minute session. 

It wasn't perfect in my mind. I screwed up the wording a few times, but the agent smiled and was genuinely engaged in my effort to be succinct about the completed project. She expressed interest, asked me to send a package and I walked out of the session feeling a confidence I'd not experienced before that moment. 

The exercise of creating a pitch that is pretty spot-on has indicated to me that I'm ready to let it go into the world. It isn't just mine anymore. Same holds true for my daughter. She's into the world too.