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@thefrickfrackster
Before I turn in for the night I wanted to share something new I picked up in Clip Studio: converting brush strokes into vector lineart. Super helpful for finishing intricate designs quick & easy like that elven artifact I made.
There’s only a few steps to it: make a cool design using thick brush strokes, right click the layer, and convert it using these settings below:
That’s really all there is to it! Here’s an example of how it turns out.
How to pitch your novel in under a minute
One of those things every author needs to learn to do at some point or other is give what’s called an “elevator pitch.” This pitch is so named, because should you be in an elevator with someone you’d like to read your book, there wouldn’t be any time for a ten-minute synopsis. You would need to pitch your idea to them in a matter of seconds, catching their interest while you still had them trapped in a small space, forced to hear you out.
Most elevator pitches aren’t actually given in elevators. They’re given at networking events, in bookstores, to friends and family, and basically whenever anybody asks “so what is your book about?” Usually the person you’re speaking to won’t be waiting for the doors to open so they can escape, but the ability to quickly spark someone’s interest in your story is invaluable.
Your “elevator pitch” should easily answer the explicit question: “so what is your book about?” and the implicit question: “and why should I want to read it?”
A good elevator pitch has two elements: the one-sentence description and a few comparable titles. These should work together to tell interested parties exactly what they need to know in as little time as possible.
The One-Sentence Description
The goal of the one-sentence description is to lay out a clear premise that’s able to pique a perspective reader’s interest. Which is actually two goals. You need a clear, simple premise that more or less describes your entire book. And you need to make that simple premise engaging.
Some advice on crafting your sentence:
Start by identifying your protagonist
Follow only one story thread
Limit it to 25 words max
Focus on the protagonist’s central conflict
Now this sentence probably isn’t going to describe your book to a T. It shouldn’t describe your book to a T. But your book should have some central idea that you can distill all of the intricacies of the plot down to.
To be engaging, it must contain an inherent question. Usually this is: ‘does this person succeed?’ Sometimes it’s: ‘do they get together?’ It may be: ‘but is he really the murderer?’ If a reader can’t ask a question at the sentence’s end, your summary hasn’t properly engaged them.
Examples:
A boy wizard begins training and must battle for his life with the Dark Lord who murdered his parents. (Source)
A young English nurse searches for the way back home after time-traveling from 1945 to 1743 Scotland. (Source)
A young man learns that destroying his magic ring is the key to saving his world from the Dark Lord. (Source)
Come Up With Multiple One Sentence Descriptions
Sometimes you don’t have to pitch THE high concept idea of your novel. Sometimes you’ll want to tailor your pitch to a particular reader.
War and Peace is a slow-burn love story between Natasha and Pierre. War and Peace is about the effect of the Napoleonic wars on Russian high society. War and Peace is about the search for a life of meaning and purpose set in 18th c. Russia.
A war historian won’t like War and Peace for the same reasons as a reader interested in romance, and a reader interested in romance won’t like War and Peace for the same reasons as a philosopher, but they will all like the same book.
When pitching, it’s important to pitch your story to a specific audience. Draw out certain elements of a story according to certain reader’s tastes (if you know them). Have a few one-sentence descriptions that emphasise different elements of your story for every type of reader you come across.
When pitching your book in 25 words, you’ll need to aim the arrow straight at the heart.
The Comparisons
The dreaded “X Meets Y” pitch. Once you’ve neatly summarised your story, it’s time to compare it to something. You don’t necessarily need to follow the “X meets Y” format to a T, but you do need to mention a few comparable titles.
Your comparisons can be a short-hand for style, tone, and all the sorts of things that can’t possibly be described in a sentence, no matter how long. They also serve to show your book’s potential place in the market, suggesting the sort of readers who might be interested in your book. This means you’ll typically want to use comps that are in the same age range and genre. Try to pick books that aren’t the most popular books in their genre, but that the person you’re pitching to should be familiar with.
Some formats you can use instead of “X Meets Y”:
In the vein of X and Y
Would appeal to fans of X and Y
Like X but [concept]
Put them together and memorise
The elevator pitch for my WIP is:
A girl inherits a book of spells and tries to fix the problems of her small town with its magic. [TITLE] has the heart of Kiki’s Delivery Service and the danger of The Graveyard Book.
That pitch may not interest you particularly, but a fan of the comp titles certainly would be, and that’s exactly the sort of person the pitch is aimed towards (the sort of person who would probably enjoy the book). If I keep these two sentences in my back pocket, I have everything I need to grab a likely reader’s attention.
Even if they’re only going from Floor 1 to Floor 2.
Sources:
The Art of Writing Copy
PubCrawl Podcast “X Meets Y” Pitches
How to Pitch Your Novel
Twitter Pitching Like a Pro
Nail Your Pitch
One Sentence Summary Clinic
Writing a One Sentence Summary
One Simple Way to Sharpen Your Pitch
Pitch Tips
On Good and Bad Book Pitches
playing with ocs is either
or
You know what, I don’t appreciate you putting me on the spot like that.
you know what i don’t appreciate you putting me on the spot like that
^Haiku^bot^9. I detect haikus with 5-7-5 format. Sometimes I make mistakes. Support me to cyborgify you! (ʘ‿ʘ) | PayPal | Patreon
The real writer experience is standing in the shower and coming up with the most authentic dialogue with perfect phrasing and raw emotion in your head, then stepping out and drying your hair, putting on some clean pajamas and opening a word document to write down all your perfect ideas only to realize everything has evaporated.
I FEEL CALLED OUT
Never lose a perfect shower line again.*
*Remember to erase promptly if you share a bathroom with anyone.
I’ve used these to outline term papers. nothing like a bath to get your brain to finally kick into gear and figure out your damn thesis
WHAT
Also these handy little guys if you prefer a notepad:
Are you kidding, shower crayons are the BEST when you share a bathroom with other people. When I was in college, we had them and we would use them to carry on philosophical debates, finish song lyrics, get life/writing advice, etc. It was so much fun and I miss it.
@doctorhelena @littlereyofsunlight @indiefic
I know there’s the whole thing about killing a character off to show the injustice of the world or whatever, and yes you probably should avoid a twilight and genuinely kill at least one of your main or secondary characters (not just a random one which you threw in just so you can kill them)
But you don’t have to kill a character to kill them
You could break them completely, strip away everything they know and force them to become a different person, essentially killing who they were before. Even just with gradual character development you could eradicate the character that was first introduced.
You could take away their will to live, have them screaming for death, and deny them the right to die.
Have the hero become the villain. The villain become the hero.
Have the likeable become the hated.
Make your readers wish the character had died.
Reblogging for last sentence
This is sublime writing advice
I made a helpful infographic to explain
The eternal struggle of an artist.
My first art tutorial!
a family can be me and my 10,000 unfinished WIPs
Have I posted this yet
every writing tip article and their mother: dont ever use adverbs ever!
me, shoveling more adverbs onto the page because i do what i want: just you fucking try and stop me
May I add something, because I will never shut up about this book (Writing Tools by Roy Peter Clark):
Ohhhhhhhh
Simple lineart trick by Looji
Support the artist and check out their commissions!
“Honestly like, why do writers use cliffhangers to get attention?”
YOU JUST ANSWERED YOUR OWN DAMN QUESTION IF I SPEND TIME WRITING SOMETHING I WANT MY READERS TO BE ENGAGED AND INTERESTED SO OF FuCkING CoUSrE IM GONNA USE A CLIFFHANGER YOU MOLDY BREADSTICK
no one will ever be able to tell
controversial writing tip
open a document and start writing
how dare you
“if it’s not plot relevant, cut it!!” is such awful writing advice
if JRR Tolkien had cut every bit of Lord of the Rings that wasn’t directly related to the central plot, it would have been just one book long, COLOURLESS and DULL AS DIRT.
all the little worldbuilding/character details are what draw you in and give the central plot weight, FOOL
The plot is not the same thing as the story. The plot is the mechanics of how one thing causes another.
Some classic stories have no plot to speak of – the characters just wander from one situation to the next. Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz are examples.
Some stories have partial plots, where some things in the story cause other things, but other things come out of the blue and pass away without consequence. This category includes classics too: Huckleberry Finn, The Wind in the Willows.
Even in stories with a strong plot, sometimes the most iconic moments fall outside that plot. Think of the No-Man’s-Land scene in Wonder Woman or the dying dinosaur in Jurassic World II.
Ah, but those aren’t classics, I hear someone say. Well, I disagree in the case of Wonder Woman (although time will tell), but let’s go right to the top of the English canon, Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
What’s the most iconic scene, if you had to pick one to illustrate for the front cover or the playbill poster? Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it’s the Yorick skull scene. What does that have to do with the plot? Precious little. It’s just a way to keep Hamlet busy until Ophelia’s funeral arrives. And even there it’s not very well fit for purpose, because it doesn’t explain why Hamlet is hanging around in a graveyard anyway.
That’s because, tight though the plot of Hamlet is, the story of Hamlet is not reducible to its plot. Hamlet is a three-hour exploration of death and skulls and murder and corpses and funerals and ghosts and “what dreams may come”. The plot is just there to drive you around between the features of that mental landscape.
So the question isn’t “Does this serve the plot?” The question is “Does this help explore the idea that the story is about?”
(Why yes, I have written all this somewhere before.)
I was reading my writing today, and let me tell you, it may not be good, plot is not the best, and characters are a bit stereotypical, but boy do I have fun writing it
This is such a good mindset to have. There is positive energy in this post
