What is an Elevator Pitch?

An elevator pitch is a short summary of your idea that conveys the premise in a way that any listener, industry insider or otherwise, can understand and comprehend.

What Should be Included in an Elevator Pitch?

It'll include the most basic details of your story, plus some flourish to spark your listener's interest. Make sure you convey your protagonist, the concept, genre, plot and your personal connection to the story.

How Can Your Elevator Pitch Help Your Story?

By cutting efficiently to the very core of your story idea, you're putting it under the microscope. Are the stakes high enough? Is the protagonist journey clear enough? Just clarifying how this can come across in your elevator pitch will help you clarify it overall.

How to Write an Elevator Pitch

Don't get too caught up in the plot. Stick to the broad, striking aspects of your idea. Try writing a Venn diagram. On one side, put what you deem to be the most vital things to know to understand the story. On the other, put the wow factors that give your script flair. What overlaps in the middle can be included in your elevator pitch.

Why Nailing Your Elevator Pitch Can Massively Help Your Screenplay

It’s any screenwriter‘s fantasy to come across an acclaimed director or producer out of the blue and pitch them their passion project. Enter the infamous elevator pitch.

Chances are, of all the possible places this could happen, it won’t likely be in an elevator. But, no matter the circumstances, you’ll have only a short window of time to say what you want to say.

The brevity of an elevator pitch is a good practice in appealing to the short attention span of modern media. Many industry readers won’t continue past the first few pages if they aren’t intrigued by what they read, if that. So the primary key to an elevator pitch is to condense your script idea into something palatable and intriguing.

However, many writers fail to consider how the task of constructing a strong pitch can challenge and confront the strength of the screenplay itself. In this way, the elevator pitch functions as a step in the rewriting and revising process, one that tackles the biggest questions the story centers on.

What Is the Importance of Pitching?
What Should Your Elevator Pitch Include?
How Can Your Elevator Pitch Help Your Story?
How Should You Go About Your Elevator Pitch?
In Summary

So without further ado…

What Is the Importance of Pitching?

Pitching is all about the sale.

Even writers have to eat. In order to do so, they have to actually sell their scripts, and in order to do that, they have to convince a director, producer, or investor of some sort to first look at the script, then ultimately invest in it.

So how do you persuade others that your story is worth their money or time? By telling them the best, most interesting aspects of your story – as quickly as possible.

Essentially, your story needs to stand out to someone who has never laid their eyes on a single page of it.

This is a tall order, and to effectively execute it requires a great deal of preparation, as well as an understanding of what makes for a strong pitch. You, as the pitcher, have to find a balance between what you anticipate the pitchee will want to hear and what is most important for them to know about what you are pitching them.

There are tons of great ideas out there, but the difference between those that get noticed and those that don’t is the effectiveness of the communicator. So pitching, and especially mastering the briefest pitch form of all, is crucial to a writer’s livelihood.