So I'm pretty much finished on Monsters for the Red Planet competition, there's one scene that needs a bit of modification because the technology doesn't match what happens in the scene after. No big.
My first 10 pages are honed to perfection and carefully edited to hit a cliffhangar at the bottom of page 10. What? Every trick in the book, I say. Bill Martell says you should try to get some sort of mystery or cliffhanger at the bottom of every page. Something to keep the reader reading.
What is big is the problem of the one page pitch. I am truly rubbish at this. My ideas are so big, there are so many interleaved plot-lines, there's so much background, that it's "impossible" to do a quick and easy outline.
So I went back to basics. Who's the protagonist and what is her story? I also recalled from somewhere that you should concentrate on the emotion and character, less on the actual events. So I wrote six episode titles, figured out that I could spare three lines per episode for the page and put together an outline. In addition I use Aristotle's Dilemma, Crisis, Decision/Action and Resolution principles in the outline so that it told the story. It worked pretty well.
I need to go back to it for some editing but it's not bad considering how bad I am at this. Just read David Bishop who also points out thrillers should be have thrilling pitch docs, comedies should have unny ones and so on. What does that mean if you have a Teen Sci-Fi Detective Action Thriller? Hm.
I also added a paragraph that mentioned that this was the journey of the protagonist and that there were major plotlines covering the other major characters.
What's on the turntable? "Magic Touch" by Mike Oldfield from "Islands", not his best work in my opinion but listenable.
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