WRITER UNBOXED INTERVIEW EXCERPTS

In conjunction with the release of Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds, I recently gave what I think is one of the best interviews I've had. Terese Walsh, the cofounder of the Writer Unboxed website, asked some great questions, allowing me to reveal a number of the principles in the book, along with some of my latest thoughts about the craft and business of writing.

Part 1: Interview with Michael Hauge

Q: Your new book is entitled Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds: The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read . What commonalities do you find between novelists and screenwriters?

MH: Writers working in either arena have to get their work read by the people who can represent them, or who can help get whatever they've created in front of a mass audience. So screenwriters have to get it read by producers or financiers or studios, and novelists have to get their work read by editors at publishing houses.

One of biggest obstacles that writers in both arenas face is how to get through that seemingly impenetrable screening system that is set up to get it in the hands of people in power, so that those people can actually see the work you've done. Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds shows writers how to do exactly that.

Q: Is it easier to pitch high concept?

MH: Certainly if you have a high concept idea, it becomes a bit easier to give a one-minute pitch for it. Just the logline, which you can summarize in about ten seconds, is going to sound unique and exciting. The more difficult pitch is for the story that's more complex, perhaps more interior, perhaps more about character arc and theme than just about plot and adrenaline. But it still can be done, because whatever the story is, something in that story will elicit emotion in an audience. If it won't, then the story doesn't work and it isn't going to get made. If it is an emotional experience, whatever that emotional core is about is what you'll need to express in less than sixty seconds.

Q: So the emotional core is truly key?

MH: Here's the thing: Everybody you pitch to is thinking about how they're going to make money. Your idea has to turn a profit. Publishers and producers and distributors aren't in the business they're in—and can't stay in the business they're in—if their income from a story doesn't exceed its cost. Now movies are hugely expensive, which is why far fewer movies are made than novels published. Still, everything has to turn a profit, and to turn a profit it has to find an audience.

The only way books make money and movies make money is if people want to buy them and see them and read them. So one of things that has to come across in your pitch is what that commercial potential will be. The first thing the buyer is looking for is something she can take to her boss and say, “I think we can get a deal for this. I think this is going to sell and make money.” It doesn't mean that it has to be a high-concept story, but it does mean that is has to create an emotional experience that the mass audience is going to want to have. And it means that whatever that emotional experience is, it has to attract enough people to turn a profit.

It's a little different in publishing, because you can run off a thousand books and it doesn't matter what the story is, the cost of running it off is the same. In movies, however, there are high-budget and low-budget films. So if you're pitching a movie that's going to cost about a hundred million dollars to produce and distribute, which is probably about the average for a Hollywood film, that means it's going to have to bring in more than $200,000,000 at the box office and in video sales just to break even. So a whole lot of people are going to have to see it. But if you have screenplay for a movie that's only going to cost a few million dollars or a few hundred thousand dollars and can be distributed slowly, it doesn't need that kind of response.

Take a movie like THE SQUID AND THE WHALE from last year; I thought that was a wonderful movie, and it was probably made for about a dollar and a half. But I'm sure it was quite profitable, because it didn't cost that much and didn't need the audience that Harry Potter needed to make it successful. The same with CRASH; it's done extremely well financially, in part because it didn't cost that much to make in the first place.

Q: So let's assume you have a good manuscript or screenplay with a strong emotional core. Are there any tricks to getting your story read? What do you touch on in your book?

MH: The whole book is full of tricks, but I'll tell you the number one trick, the number one rule of pitching your story: you absolutely do not try to tell your story. That is the single biggest mistake that the vast number of writers make when trying to pitch their script or manuscript. Somebody says to them, “What's your story about?” and they think they're supposed to answer that question. But they're not! You cannot possibly tell your story in sixty seconds.

What you can do is describe your story in a way that makes someone want to read the whole thing. So the toughest challenge you face when preparing your pitch is to figure out which of the key elements of your story are the ones you want to include in your sixty seconds. These are the elements that you believe will hook people in. In my book, I give a list of ten key story elements: there's a hero; that hero has a goal; the hero faces big obstacles; there's an arc for the character; the story has antecedents—other movies or novels that have been successful and that are like your own; etc. Those are some of elements. The idea, the process, is to go down that list and ask, “Okay, of all these elements, which are the ones that would be the best to talk about?”

For example, if you're writing a big budget action thriller, the main thing you want to get across is the goal and the conflict: a woman's child is kidnapped and she has to go up against gang of killers to rescue him. If that's my pitch—and that took me about four seconds—I'd still have almost a full minute to go into the most emotional details. If that's the kind of story it is, then those are the main things to get across—what the hero wants and what the obstacle is.

Or consider a movie like SHOPGIRL . If all you said was, “A salesgirl wants to date two guys and choose between them,” or, “A salesgirl wants a relationship with an older man,” that log line doesn't convey the emotion of that story. What you'd want to emphasize in that pitch is the genre, the inner life of the characters, the arc the shopgirl and the other characters take, and probably the antecedents, to clearly convey it's a serious comedy. In other words, the idea is to pick the items that are best going to convey the emotional potential of your story, and focus on those when you give your sixty-second pitch.

To read the complete interview, click here.

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