ONLINE Writer Training Session: Pitch Your Work

This 2-hour online workshop will teach you in a practical way how to talk about your work, and pitch it to agents / editors / commissioning editors / producers – whatever is relevant to your artform.

Your tutor will be Olivia Chapman, from Writing West Midlands.

You’ll learn how to structure your pitch, talk confidently and clearly about your plot and genre, and practise your pitch.

This workshop is intended for prose writers (both fiction and non-fiction) and scriptwriters. The content can be adapted for poetry but works best if your poetry collection is themed or can be pulled together to talk about in broader terms than individual poems.

In order to participate fully, you will need to have a complete story / poetry collection (in whatever form) which you can talk about from start to finish. You will learn skills you can transfer to any other story, but to get the most out of the workshop, it will be helpful to just focus on one you can finesse.

Although you do not need to be published to attend, you do need to have a complete manuscript to be able to base your pitch on.

Learning to have a succinct pitch which does your story justice will help you talk about it to strangers and key people you want to impress, but will also help you unknot any tricky plotlines and issues of pacing, characterisation and context.

A previous Pitch Your Work training session attendee said:

“Following this session, I do now feel confident pitching my novel to anyone. But by the end, I realised that what I was pitching was in fact a far better book than I’d written. Two weeks later, I am now 30,000 words into a completely new version and it is so much better because I can see so clearly what I’m really trying to do with it, how I’m really trying to tell this story.”

Details:

Tickets £25.00

The workshop will take place online via Zoom Online Meeting software. It is free to download and you will only need the free version to attend. Please download it and check it is working before the day of the workshop.

Olivia will be “hosting” the meeting, and will be online 15 minutes before the advertised start time to allow you to join and test your audio and video is working as it should.

Please try and be somewhere you can concentrate and won’t be interrupted. Headphones can be useful if you have some, to cut out other noise.

The meeting host will mute all mics and switch them on for general discussion, asking participants to raise their hand to speak – online meetings make it much harder to see if someone wants to speak.

Biography:

Olivia Chapman is the PR & Communications Manager for Writing West Midlands, and has been pitching books and scripts as well as events and festivals since she started working in publishing in 2005.

Please note: you must sign up for the full course even if you cannot attend all dates. No partial course ticket is available.

Short Courses are for over 18s.