Elevator Pitch: Define your Story in an Hour

by Matt Briggs

Every character should want something, even if it is only a glass of water. — Kurt Vonnegut

Define your story in an hour. Using a worksheet and an explanation of how to structure your novel or memoir, you can rapidly define the essential plot of your novel. EM Forester defined plot in his book Aspects of the Novel:

“Let us define a plot. We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The kind died and then the queen died,” is a story. “The kind died, and then the queen died of grief,” is a plot.”

In Elevator Pitch, author Matt Briggs provides a framework for you to identify the motives of your characters and clearly spell out the reason your characters act. Furthermore, Briggs provides guidance on boiling down your complex novel idea into a short statement that can fit the attention span of the people who can make the biggest difference in your writing life: agents, editors, and book reviewers.

Matt Briggs’s novel, Shoot the Buffalo was awarded an American Book Award in 2006 by The Before Columbus Foundation. The author of eight works of fiction Briggs has taught at the Johns Hopkins University, University of Washington, Henry Cogswell College, and Richard Hugo House. His work has won a number of prizes including The Nelson Bentley Prize in Fiction from The Seattle Review, The Stranger Genius Award, and grants from 4Culture and the city of Seattle.

16 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 9, 2013

About the author

Matt Briggs grew up in the Snoqualmie Valley, raised by working-class, counter-culture parents who cultivated and sold cannabis. Briggs has written two books set in rural Washington chronicling this life, The Remains of River Names and Shoot the Buffalo. Critic Ann Powers wrote of Briggs first book in the New York Times Book Review, "Briggs has captured the America that neither progressives nor family-value advocates want to think about, where bohemianism has degenerated into dangerous dropping out." Briggs has published a number of collection of stories, including The Moss Gatherers and The End is the Beginning. Of his stories, Jim Feast wrote in the American Book Review, "All of Briggs’s zigzagging stories are told with great attention to the details of lowbrow culture and the contours of the American Northwest."