6 Pitch Wars Lessons
I learned a lot from my three months as a Pitch Wars mentee under Jamie McHenry’s mentorship. Too much to fit in a tweet. So here are my biggest lessons which will hopefully help other aspiring writers!
1. Save the Cat Beats Aren’t As Easy As They Seem
I read Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat and used the beat sheet to calculate out my beats. But I was still off. My pacing didn’t work. After reading Jamie’s edit letter, I had an aha moment: the beats all need to center on the main plot.
It seems so simple, but it was a piece I was missing. I had beats focused on internal conflicts and character arcs. I had some beats centered on sub plots. I didn’t have every beat advancing the plot.
Similarly, reading Save the Cat Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody was a game-changer. I thought it might be too similar to the original to be worth the cash, but I assure you, it holds some real gold.
My climax was definitely a weakness in my original MS. CPs had told me, I knew it, and yet, I still couldn’t figure out how to fix it. Then I read Brody’s book.
She lays out five mini beats for the third act to lead up to the climax. Breaking it down into steps really helped me see where I needed to add action and tension to give readers a satisfying ending to my book.
2. Likable Characters Need To Do More Than Save the Cat (Maybe Pet a Dog!)
I’d had a few other readers who were annoyed by one of my POV character, but I didn’t understand why. I thought she was honest about her desperation, but not unlikable.
I tried to have a “save the cat” moment the first time readers met my characters, but it wasn’t enough.
Jamie gave me some great lessons in this. He showed me three small excerpts in my writing and then tweaked them slightly, writing an analysis of how the tweaks would impact readers differently. It really opened my eyes (I even shared the revisions and analysis with my high school class to show them the thinking writers do).
The excerpt that stands out the most is a moment when my character comes home from the hospital, but her sister is still missing. She comes in to greet the dog, but when the dog whines at the door for her sister to enter, my character simply stands there and thinks about how sad it is.
Instead, Jamie had my character bend down and comfort the dog. So small! So simple! How could I have not seen it before? Giving her a moment of compassion, especially for her lovable canine, made my character more endearing to the reader. From there, I was able to comb through the rest of my MS and find more places to improve.
3. Get Deep Inside Your Antagonist’s Head
Truthfully, this should be labeled “GET AN ANTAGONIST,” because I didn’t have one when I submitted to Pitch Wars.
I mean, I thought I had an antagonist. But, alas, I was wrong.
So when I was carefully structuring how my antagonist would be pushing back against my protagonist in the book, Jamie suggested I think about how she would react to things in her POV.
I decided to go back to an old brainstorming technique and free-write about the book in a diary entry from a character’s POV. I’d done this with my POV characters in the early stages of the book or whenever I was stuck, but never the antagonist.
So I began. I wrote, “Dear Diary, My name is ______, and I am the villain.” I sent my free writing to Jamie. His big piece of advice blew it all open for me: This character isn’t the villain. Not in her own head. She’s the hero of her own story!
So I sat back down to the computer with a new doc and began again: “Dear Diary, My name is _____, and I am the hero of my own story.” The entry that followed was deeper and more thought out. It captured my character’s motives and reactions so much more precisely than the first.
This is a writing strategy I plan on using during every drafting process from now on.
4. Change Your Characters’ Environment
In my original, I have a POV character arguing with her maybe-flirty love interest. They’re standing in a hall, private, secluded, and angry. There’s tension, but then I thought, “What else can they be doing while they’re fighting?”
I instantly decided I wanted to make the fight more public. Now, they’re in a room full of peers, but trying to keep their voices down. They want to scream at each other, but can’t in front of everyone.
Then I decided, what if while they were fighting, they were also supposed to be working together? So I put them on the same team of an activity. Now they want to scream at each other, but can’t in front of everyone, and have to help one another.
And when you have any good love interest scene, you have to sprinkle in a few good tropes, right? Sharing one bed was not appropriate for the scene, but how about one chair? Forced proximity, anyone?
So now my characters are in the middle of playing floor is lava in a team race, wanting to scream at each other, but not in front of everyone, and forced to stand on the same chair, chest-to-chest, while they do it.
5. Have FUN With Your Writing
I remember being waist deep in plotting ideas right in my murky middle of one POV that basically needed to be completely rewritten. I had so many ideas, and I couldn’t decide which path was right.
So I sent Jamie an email, aptly named “Maddy POV Dumpster Fire” and asked for help extinguishing it. He looked at the doc I sent (A table showing a summary of those original chapters, excerpts from the edit letter he sent about them, and my ideas for the new revisions). His advice was simple: Have fun with it!
Have fun with the writing and your reader will have fun with the reading.
I was getting too caught up and anxious about my choices, and I forgot to have fun during Pitch Wars. So my Maddy gets to have some fun in those chapters when she gets caught up in a prank war during her senior trip. I love it, and I hope my future readers will too!
6. Pitch Wars is not the only path to publishing.
I know, I know. You’ve heard it before. But I’m telling you again, because I was rejected for PW with my two other MSs. I didn’t even have hope for the second one. But once I had a fresh MS, I took the plunge and applied again. I got in.
But another applicant who applied to Jamie pulled her application, got an agent, and went on submission before the Pitch Wars agent showcase even began. (Shout out to @tanyacarinae! You’re awesome!)
And in this thread, a Pitch Wars alum shares her experience in the program. Her honesty helped me have a realistic approach coming into showcase week.
All writers have their own path to publishing. Pitch Wars is just one stop for some writers, and definitely not a fast track.
In the end, I think the most valuable thing I got from Pitch Wars was support–not just from my mentor on my writing, but from new friends going through a shared experience. I will value and treasure these last three months forever.
