Pitching Stories

Looking back at the first emails I sent out pitching stories to editors, I shudder with embarrassment. My first pitches read like a middle schooler's letter to a senator--not the way to impress an editor.

"Dear Editor,

I am a graduate of the University now serving on a Princeton in Asia fellowship teaching English in Guangzhou. I'm from . . ."

Wrong.

Editors are on par with God in terms of being overworked and having an inflated sense of self-importance. Thus, emails with wordy openings like mine wind up in the trash.

As a part of being incredibly bust, editors care only about ideas; they couldn't care less about your resume. In the world of writing, ideas and "clips" (articles previously published) are the standard currency.

No one cares where you graduated from. Most editors (perhaps all) have no clue that I went to Michigan. Instead, what they look at is the power, the catchiness of your ideas and whether or not they fit with what the magazine needs.

Second, knowing that you have experience writing is important. A sentence referencing where you've published goes a lot farther than a sentence describing your Boy Scout rank and GPA. Starting out, this is a problem, but calling yourself a freelancer will work. Additionally, publishing editorials in your hometown's newspaper is an easy way of getting published fast (without being paid, of course).

Nowadays, my cold-call introduction is one sentence long and it consists of (1) I am a freelancer (2) based in Beijing and (3) I speak Chinese. This way's easier for me and works better with editors.

Finally, editors want story pitches to be punchy. A huge difference between writing for class and writing for publications is punchiness. At UM, I got used to writing in detail, splitting hairs, and qualifying arguments. In freelancing, I've had to learn to pare down my writing and pitches to jazz up the details, pick out the most important, interesting, or take-away point and bring it to the front.

This takes judgment on your part. A trip of mine up Emei Mountain was full of adventure--bunking in a monastery; altitude sickness; violent, thieving monkeys--but in pitching it to an editor, I had to choose the most interesting point (the monkey gauntlet) and pitch the stories as if the entire trip had been about the monkeys. Of course, the article itself has room for other details, but, without a focus and a story thread, the article becomes boring.

Thus, pitches should be two or three sentences long, dressing up the exciting point of the article. At the end, a sentence explaining why it is a good fit for the particular outlet can help too.

Perfecting the art of pitching can take time and effort, but the upshot is that with enough work in the beginning, you won't need to pitch later--editors will start finding you.