Pitching is an essential skill for all writers. If you want to get assignments and or have someone publish your book, you need to make a pitch. David Remnick of The New Yorker will not magically find the brilliant manuscript…
The person, be it gentleman or lady, who has not pleasure in a good novel, must be intolerably stupid.
Jane Austen
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a nam
Don’t try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It’s the one and only thing you have to offer.
Barbara Kingsolver
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway
“One false word, one extra word, and somebody's thinking about how they have to buy paper towels at the store.”
Patricia Marx
