Pitching backwards, and Standing Stones

Last week, I threw out a Feedback Friday challenge based off the first volume of our Good To Great course.

The essence of that task, and of the course material, was to consider your book’s elevator pitch not as a final thought – a sticker glued on to the book cover at the final minute – but as a blueprint for production. What’s the book’s DNA? What are its most essential ingredients, the elements that make it up? If your book is to succeed, that answer has to be compelling. Your book will stand, naked, on a bookstore table (or an Amazon page) that’s crowded with repeat bestsellers and authors much better known than you. There’s no way to win that contest except by having an idea that shines so bright and attractively that your book compels attention.

The course video (which I urge you to watch; it’s free) talks about how to start with an ultra-short pitch/blueprint – a list of ingredients even – and how to build out from there. To characters, to settings, to themes, and so on.

The aim here is that every aspect of your book should be firmly founded on your core idea – and that the idea itself should be so compelling that the book can’t not sell. The absolute key is to make sure that every part of your book lines up behind a single great idea.

Pitching backwards

Now, I hope it’s obvious that that’s a sound way to build a book… and yet – have I told you too late? Almost all of you reading this email have already written all or part of your manuscript. So me telling you now that you should have done something 60,000 words ago may not exactly strike you as terribly helpful. (One of you on Townhouse said that “pitching backwards feels like a feat of gymnastics” – which is a fair comment.)

And yet –

It is helpful. These things are helpful at any stage and every stage. If you know what you’re aiming at – a book where everything lines up perfectly behind one stellar idea –you can always navigate from where you are to where you need to be.

The trick is to navigate without cheating.

What you mustn’t ask is:

“How do I take the material I have already concocted and make it look as though it obeys these rules?”

What you must ask is:

“Honestly – does my material feel like it all lines up in this way? And is the idea strong enough? And, having thought these things through, are there adjustments I should make to the stuff I’ve already written, even though I know it will cost me weeks of work to make those adjustments?”

Anything else, you can bodge if you like. You can have a character who’s a bit limp, a scene that’s a bit weak, a plot turn that’s a bit contrived, a setting that’s a bit bland. All those things – and your book can still sell. None of my books has gone out into the world with no bodging anywhere.

But a weak idea? Or a book that doesn’t manifest the strong one that you started with? That book won’t sell. And it doesn’t deserve to.

So yes, pitching backwards is an arse-over-tip way to do things. (That lovely phrase comes courtesy of my sister’s long-ago riding instructor, a woman so sweary, she’d make Princess Anne look genteel.) But if you didn’t do the exercise properly when you started out, you need to do it properly now.

Is your idea strong enough?

Is there total unity between that idea and everything else in the book – characters, themes, settings, everything? Are those things so tightly glued together that your book feels somehow inevitable, necessary?

Those are the questions you must ask.

They matter.

And pitch backwards if you have to.

Standing stones and character Verdicts

When I set these Feedback Friday tasks, I’m often surprised at what comes back. Those surprises are always positive; I always learn something.

Last week, I realised that we build character up in layers. To we humans, the top layer is the one that matters most. To a pitch-concerned novelist, it’s the bottom layer.

Here’s what I mean:

Who is Fiona Griffiths? How do we describe her? Here’s how I think about forming an answer:

Standing Stones

I start with some key facts – rocks projecting unmissably from the landscape. They’re the things that any explanation of Fiona has to acknowledge. Any triangulation has to start from there. So:

• Fiona had Cotards Syndrome as a teenager (she used to think she was dead).
• Fiona doesn’t know her true birth mother or father. She was found in the back of her adoptive father’s car when she was about 2 years old. For a long time, she was mute.
• Her adoptive father was (is?) a criminal.
• Fiona can be violent. (A creepy witness once felt her bum. She broke his fingers and dislocated his knee. She was a police officer at the time.)
• Fiona has a double first in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge – and won a university philosophy prize to boot.
• At the start of the series, she’d never really had a proper boyfriend. When at university, she had a phase of thinking she was lesbian.
• Fiona is a detective.

All these things are facts. They’re not things that are up for argument or discussion. They refer back to things that happened or are true in the present. They’re standing stones, your rocks, the first and most critical layer of character-formation.

(And in parenthesis: my character is quite big and highly coloured. If your character’s own standing stones are a little lower to the ground, that’s fine. You’re just writing a different kind of book.)

Dispositions

Now we get to the next level up – dispositions, ways of summarising your emerging character.

So, again for Fiona, we have something like this:

Fiona is electrically intelligent. She’s Sherlock Holmes level bright.

She adores murder investigation. It’s one of very few things that fully engages her.

She’s a dunce about many things-in-the-world. Her knowledge of pop culture is near-zero. She’s a hopeless cook. She has no dress sense. If there’s a glass wall in an office or a bus shelter, she’s quite likely to walk straight into it.

She’s funny. She’ll make you laugh.

Dead people calm her. She likes them. She feels them to be friends.

Yes, novel-detectives are always mavericks. But Fiona really is. Illegal handguns? Growing and smoking her own weed? Solo mission to shoot up some bad guys? Throwing Russian baddies off a cliff? Yep, that’s Fiona. (And that’s just book one.)

These things are facts, too. I mean, you couldn’t reasonably disagree about whether Fiona is intelligent or not. But this set of facts doesn’t have that standing stone like quality: single, obtrusive, unmistakable, un-ignorable – the marker-events of a person’s life.

This second list of ours – ‘dispositions’ – doesn’t comprise things as singular as our standing stones. You don’t really know whether Fiona is genuinely funny until you’ve heard her for a bit. If she makes you laugh once, that could be a one-off. But if she does it again and again, then you have to say, yes, she’s funny. Same thing with her intelligence. Same thing with her dunce-in-the-world-ness.

So, our second level of character analysis gets to things that are definite facts, but they’re not singular facts. They’re more like dispositions – repeated observations of a trait.

And then, we get to our third level –

Verdicts

Is our character conscientious?

Does she have a sense of right and wrong?

Is she loyal?

Is she open to new things, or does she prefer the tried-and-trusted?

Is she valiant – or, perhaps better, what is it that brings out her valour? When does she show her courage?

We as people like to discuss these things in relation to others, and as novelists we like to discuss them in relation to our characters. (And roughly: Fiona is not conscientious, she has a strong sense of right and wrong, she is loyal, she is open to the new, she is valiant in almost any context.)

But?

I don’t think these things should form part of your character analysis, or not really. I think something like the opposite is the truth. You build your character on the basis of your standing stones and your dispositions. Then you follow that character through the course of your story, writing her as carefully as you can. Then you can stand back and judge. Conscientious, yes or no? Valiant, yes or no?

As it happens, I think that in most cases, those questions won’t even have easy answers. I just gave a quick-fire set of responses in relation to Fiona, but they’re not very good.

Is Fiona conscientious? Yes: she goes way beyond expectations in anything murder-related. But in other spheres, she’s hopelessly unreliable. So: going through endless phone records because there’s just possibly a lead buried in there somewhere? Yes, she’ll do that, and without being asked. But: filling out a simple pension form, because someone in her office needs her to do it? Nope, she’ll avoid that until someone pretty much forces her.

Why I’m even talking about this

The reason why I’m plappering on about this (this word, courtesy of my elder daughter) is that when I asked you to give me your pitch / theme / character details, a lot of you shot straight through to the character verdict level. And I don’t want that. When you’re putting together the blueprint for your novel, the standing stones are way more important. The dispositions are next most important. The character verdicts don’t really matter at all – they’re something to argue about once the novel is finished.

I hope that makes sense. In any case, since this week’s Feedback Friday is going to hammer away at this topic, it’ll make sense before I have done with you, or I’ll want to know the raisin why.

This email is too long, so I will not tell you about the extraordinary encounter I had just yesterday with – but no. This email is too long.

***

FEEDBACK FRIDAY: STANDING STONES

Right. Character. I want you to outline your character’s:

• Standing Stones. Big, singular, formative events or facts in your character’s life.
• Dispositions. Unmistakeable traits that run right through the book.
• Verdicts. What do you make of the character you’ve just created. (And, psst, I don’t really care about this bit of the answer. Nor should you.)

Do you want an extra bonus point? You do? Then also please tell me:

• Your ultra-short pitch or list of ingredients.

What we really, really want to see here is a lovely reverberation between the pitch and the standing stones. We want to think, ‘Oh yes, that character with that past in that story situation and that setting? Sounds glorious. Tell me more.’ If you do that, you’ve won. When you’re ready, post yours here.

Over to you.

Til soon.

Harry