From Seed to Story: Drafting a Pitch to Test Your Book Idea

Lots of people have an idea for a book—how do you expand that seed of a story into a full-fledged book?

In Starting a Writing Project, a program I teach at The Story Center, I have participants complete an exercise designed to help identify the story seeds they already have and start to gather the ones they still need. (I talk about novels because that’s what I write, but this works for other genres, too!)

The prompt: Write a draft pitch for your novel.

A pitch is a 1-2 sentence summary of your book that’s focused on the hook and premise. A pitch answers these questions: Who is your main character? What do they want? What stands in their way? What must they do to overcome the obstacle? And what's at stake—what are the consequences if they can’t get what they want?

The formula: When [identity] [protagonist name] [does something or something happens to them], [the results]. But now that [obstacle], [protagonist] must [do something] to [accomplish x goal] or else [lose y].

Here’s a pitch I wrote for The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

Example: When her abusive mother dies, single, friendless Eleanor Vance is free of her caregiving duties and lands a new job: investigating paranormal activity with a small group at the historic Hill House. But when the House begins to target Eleanor, she must find a way to keep Hill House out of her head or leave—and lose the only kind of family she’s ever had.

For me, this exercise brings the core of my book idea into focus. So when I spoke with author Sarah Henning earlier this year about her teaching Teen Story Camp, and she wanted to run a workshop on using a pitch to build out a book idea, I was thrilled.

Teen Story Camp is an annual three-day workshop for teen writers taught by a beloved YA and/or middle grade author—this year, the prolific Sarah Henning. Teen Story Camp 2025 was July 21-23.

Sarah Henning with the in-person attendees at Teen Story Camp.

Sarah’s workshop covered a variety of pitches, including the short pitch (like my example above) and the long pitch. Here’s the basic structure Sarah provided for the long pitch.

1. The character’s before + the inciting incident
2. Enter the challenge brought on by the inciting incident
3. Yada-yada: the fun and games and hints at the story’s direction

And here’s an example of the long pitch for Sarah’s book, Throw Like a Girl.

Slide provided courtesy of the author, Sarah Henning.

When it comes to novel writing, I’m a pantser. But in my current novel-in-progress, I’d stalled out around 15k words, staring down the messy middle of my draft and wondering what plot points could possibly come next. At Teen Story Camp, I followed along with the teen writers to expand my short pitch for my novel-in-progress to a long pitch…and all my remaining major plot points snapped into place. Forcing myself to articulate the story in clear and marketable terms, the way I would pitch it to my agent, brought clarity to my ideas.

As Sarah said, “Taking the squishy mass of an idea and molding it into a clear and concise pitch is one of the best ways writers can set themselves up for success in a manuscript.” Try these exercises on your book idea!

Melanie Pierce
Story Center Program Manager