Writing the pitch before the query: What literary agents are really looking for

There is something oddly intimidating about writing a book pitch.

After months, sometimes years, of writing a novel, reducing it to a handful of paragraphs can feel almost impossible. You've lived with these characters, wandered through their world, untangled their motivations and rewritten countless scenes. Then someone asks, "So what's your book about?"

Suddenly, your carefully crafted story becomes "Well... it's complicated."

How to write like Joan Didion

What makes a Joan Didion sentence unmistakable? It’s not only the vocabulary or the rhythm. It’s the control. The precise needlepoint balance between distance and emotion, between clarity and chaos. Her prose doesn’t shout; it slices.

In her best work, Didion captures a moment so cleanly that the emotional aftermath lingers longer than the reading itself. Consider this line from The Year of Magical Thinking:

"Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it."