I’m finalizing another post about the anatomy of a freelance pitch, but while writing it I had a thought. What do you do when pitch just won’t come together? Forget how to lay the thing out, what happens when the words won’t come?

Or they do… and what results is utter dross.

Fret not, it happens often. As a freelancer volume is key and king. You have to send out pitches nearly every day in order to keep the lights on, knowing that most will get rejected. Personally, I send out anywhere from five to eight per week. With that kind of volume it’s inevitable that many will feel off.

I’ll link to Anatomy of a Pitch soon (ironically, as soon as I fix the problems with the pitch I’m using as an example). However in the meantime, here are a few problems I have most often while trying to write a pitch and what I do about them.

You Don’t Know The Story

The cursor is blinking and blinking, but nothing comes out. This is the curse of writer’s block and nine times out of ten the problem is that you simply don’t know the story you want to tell.

Don’t worry, this happens all the time.

Many, if not most, articles begin with little more than an interesting observation. “Wow, that happened to you?” or “I can’t believe they built that.” Sometimes it all starts with a question. “I wonder why some of the taxi trucks in Chiang Mai are painted yellow?” Now you’d like to turn that into a piece.

If you can’t think of what to say in the pitch, it’s most likely because you’re stuck on that initial observation. You found something cool but don’t know what else to say about it.

First and foremost, good for you! Having this problem means that you understand the difference between a neat observation and an actual story. You’re searching for something to say because you know that you need to say something more.

Here, try going back to basics: Who, what, when, where, why and how?

Your story, once finished, will need to answer those six questions. So write them down and elaborate. In the final piece who will you talk about? What events will happen, and why? Where is it set and what makes that important? Then read critically.

Your weak spots are here. They’re what’s keeping the story from taking shape. By the time you have a clever or interesting answer to each of those questions you’ll probably be in business.

The Pitch Has No Story

This one is harder to catch.

In this case, you often wrote the whole thing out but are unsatisfied. Reading through, the pitch just feels lifeless… It’s flat, off and wrong. You know that you wouldn’t buy this piece.

Don’t send it out hoping that someone else will. Let’s get back to work.

A good red flag for this problem is ending your summary with something like “this article will tell the story of” or “this piece will be about.” Phrases like this may mean that in your gut you know the pitch didn’t already tell that story and are trying to compensate.

Often this is because you haven’t evolved your article into an actual narrative yet. You’ve expanded on the original observation, but it reads like a collection of bullet points rather than a coherent story.

In this case go back to structure. Every story has a beginning, a middle and an end. It has good characters, a central conflict and stakes. Again, write those out. Who are the key characters in the story you want to tell? Why do the readers care? What is the motivating conflict and, most importantly, what is the beginning, middle and end?

Get these pieces in place and you’ll probably have your narrative.

The Pitch Doesn’t Feel Real

This is the converse of the above. Here, you have a coherent narrative that lacks information. The pitch has a bunch of abstract observations and subjective opinion. Reading through you realize that the story doesn’t convince, or doesn’t make the point you’d like it to.

What’s happening here is, often, a lack of concrete details.

A good pitch includes many of the facts that will make your story compelling. . Without them the story, pretty much any story, just doesn’t come to life.

One good way to check for this problem is to ask what an editor would learn by reading through the pitch. If that’s missing, you probably have a details problem.

To fix this, consider how a lawyer writes a brief: Make sure every sentence includes new information, and make sure every piece of analysis relies only on the facts that came before. So take your pitch apart sentence by sentence. When each teaches the reader something they didn’t know before, you’ll be off to a good start.

You Don’t Like It

Tougher still.

Sometimes you get to the end of a pitch and just don’t like what you’ve written. The issue is there, the facts are in and the elements add up to a functioning narrative. You just don’t think it’s any good.

There are a few ways to fix this.

First, rewrite entirely. This seems inefficient, but by starting over you give yourself the chance to rethink everything. That might just fix the problem by itself.

Second, look at the elements of your piece. Is there something missing? Do you lack a clear controversy or interesting stakes? Perhaps there’s no good character? Does the central observation need more work? Think like an engineer, take the pitch apart and look at each piece.

Finally, if neither of those options help then be honest with yourself. Is this actually a good piece? Plenty of interesting ideas don’t get further than a tweet, and it’s better to catch that now than after you’ve invested more time.

It stinks, but sometimes you just have to know when to cut bait.

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