by Turns out the fourth pitch was the one that actually worked. There is probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Three rejected pitches in a single day is, even by the fairly demanding standards of this job, a genuinely rough personal record, and I spent a good portion of this afternoon sitting at my desk staring at a blank document feeling considerably less clever than I usually like to think I am. The first pitch, about a particular political scandal everyone in this office has been discussing all week, got sent back with a note simply saying “everyone is already doing this angle,” which, fair, entirely fair, I knew that when I pitched it and hoped my specific take would be different enough to survive that exact critique. It was not.
The second pitch, considerably more ambitious, involved a genuinely elaborate satirical concept I had been quietly developing for the better part of a week, got rejected with slightly more encouraging feedback, “good bones, wrong execution,” which is the kind of note that is simultaneously reassuring and genuinely unhelpful, since it confirms the idea has merit while giving me almost nothing concrete to actually work with in fixing it. The third pitch I will admit was genuinely a bit of a stretch even by my own standards, and its rejection surprised nobody, myself included, though I did pitch it with a completely straight face regardless.
By the time the fourth idea arrived, somewhere around four in the afternoon, considerably more tired and considerably less precious about the whole process than I had been that morning, I had more or less stopped trying to be clever and simply written down the thing that had actually been bothering me all week, a genuinely small, specific, slightly odd observation about London life that had nothing to do with any of the big headline stories everyone else in the office was chasing. That one got approved within about ten minutes of submission, no notes attached beyond a single word: “yes.”
I think there is something genuinely worth learning in that specific pattern, though I am wary of drawing too tidy a lesson from what could easily just be one unusually rough day followed by one unusually lucky idea. But my honest suspicion, sitting here writing this diary entry at the end of it all, is that the first three pitches failed specifically because I was trying too hard to sound clever, to match some imagined standard of what a properly impressive pitch should look like, while the fourth one worked precisely because I had stopped performing and simply written down something genuinely true to how I actually experience this city.
My editor, when I mentioned this theory to her on the way out this evening, laughed and said something along the lines of having watched roughly this exact pattern play out with nearly every writer she has worked with over the years, the good ideas arriving reliably once the performance anxiety finally exhausts itself for the day. I found that genuinely comforting, mostly because it means today’s rough patch was not some unique personal failing but simply an ordinary, well-worn part of how this specific kind of creative work tends to actually go.
Tomorrow I am pitching again, obviously, because that is simply the job, but I am going to try consciously starting with the small, slightly odd true thing rather than the big, obviously impressive angle, on the theory that today taught me something genuinely useful about which approach actually tends to land. We shall see whether that theory survives contact with an entirely fresh set of pitches and an editor who may well reject all four of tomorrow’s ideas regardless of which strategy I choose.
I texted a friend who works in a completely unrelated field about the whole ordeal on my walk home, mostly just to vent, and she pointed out, with the specific clarity outsiders sometimes bring to a problem you are too close to properly see yourself, that this exact pattern, overthinking the impressive version and underrating the honest version, shows up constantly in her own work too, an observation from a field I know almost nothing about that nonetheless landed with genuine, immediate recognition. I think there is probably something close to a universal lesson buried in there somewhere about creative work generally, though I am wary of getting too grand about a single rough Tuesday at the office.
What I do know, sitting here writing this up properly at the end of the day, is that today’s specific rejection streak, however uncomfortable it felt in the moment, produced a genuinely better piece than I think I would have written on a day where the first idea simply sailed through without any resistance at all. I am not sure I am ready to start deliberately courting rejection as some kind of creative strategy, that feels like exactly the sort of overcorrection that would make tomorrow considerably harder rather than easier. But I am, at minimum, going to try holding today’s specific lesson a little more lightly than I might otherwise, treating the inevitable next rejection as information rather than as evidence of anything more permanent about my own abilities.
More from this author at Vivienne Pratfall, prat.uk.
