Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Confidence Is Performance

And How to Do It

I’ve learned to address the craft of pitching in both practical and psychological terms. The pitching templates and Q&As are coming, but first I want to start with a double portrait. Here is a snapshot of my professional life story, otherwise known as an author bio. I’ll follow that snapshot by telling you more about how that biography feels inside my skin.

I’ve been publishing for about twenty years. I published my first poem when I was sixteen and got my first magazine staff writer position at age nineteen. I received my BA and MFA from Columbia and finished my formal education when I was twenty-four. After graduating, I got a full-time writing job in an intercultural newsroom in San Francisco, and I acquired a literary agent who helped me sell my first novel when I was twenty-five. I spent two years reporting in that newsroom and teaching writing in the Santa Clara County juvenile justice system, and I published that novel, a gay YA hip-hopera called Sister Mischief, in 2011.

In 2012, I raised $150,000 from Kickstarter donations and private investors to produce the independent feature film I co-wrote with my friend Meera, Farah Goes Bang, and that film premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2013, where it won the first $25,000 Nora Ephron Prize from Tribeca and Vogue. I also published a collection of poems, Become a Name, with a small press called Fathom Books in 2016. Throughout all of this, I’ve published nonfiction about gender, race, culture, and media in magazines such as BuzzFeed Reader, ELLE, New Republic, Catapult, and The Cut, and that nonfiction work has garnered me fellowships from San José State University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. I’m now an associate director at the Public Humanities Initiative and a lecturer in English and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Stanford University.

Why would I give you this bird’s-eye view of my résumé? Well, you don’t know me. It’s incumbent on me to be able to provide you with this snapshot, because for our work together to succeed, you need assurance of my credibility as an authority on the subject of pitching and publishing. To demonstrate that credibility, I’m going to choose proper nouns you’re likely to recognize: Columbia, MFA, San José State, Tribeca, Bread Loaf, Stanford. I chose this language because the way I’ve been educated means I already know a few things about you too: You’re probably bright and interested in institutional recognition. I’m going to note that I was young when I put some of these notches on my résumé because I suspect many of the people reading this are as young and impatient as I once was. Through my diction, I can create the impression that you and I already have many things in common, building a sense of solidarity between us. Once that solidarity exists, we are in conversation with each other, and this has been my goal all along.

Confidence: It’s All Performance

In essence, what I’ve executed with this strategic explanation of my professional history is a performance of confidence platformed on a summary of where I’ve accrued cultural capital—which is an extremely graduate school way of saying “author bio.”

This kind of performance of confidence forms the substance of pitching itself. And you’ll recall my argument from the Introduction that all capitalism predicates itself on what I’m calling an economy of confidence: This economy expands from a series of sales, and each sale represents a performance of confidence that is rewarded with money.

However, what my performance of confidence may also have done, erroneously, is give you the impression that, after getting my grubby little paws on multiple book deals, a film release, a bunch of individual publications, and a job I love, I’ve reached a point in my career where I no longer feel fear, insecurity, doubt, shame, or stress. Much to the detriment of my mental, physical, and spiritual health, I have often conflated my worth as a human being with my publications list, my GPA, the selectiveness of the schools I attended, my tax return, my job title, my weight, and what other people thought of me.

I’m bringing these discomforts to the forefront because I don’t ever want you to think that anyone’s “success” in the literary field, or any field, can exempt them from failure, rejection, doubt, shame, or insecurity. These are our gifts for life.

Here I’d like to offer you a quick ego-scan: Below is a series of questions that will reveal where your very human ego is probably harboring some fear, shame, anxiety, or insecurity. Consider each question individually and answer Yes or No privately to yourself.

• Does thinking about pitching an editor or agent arouse any fear or anxiety?

• Does giving someone the power to reject your work make you feel fearful or anxious?

• Does finding a larger audience for your work, especially an audience that might include your friends and family members, make you feel at all fearful or anxious?

• Have you ever felt like there’s no road map for the kind of career you want?

• Be honest: Do you suspect you’re probably less qualified even to be reading this book than most of the other people reading it?

If these questions stirred up any sticky feelings, I want you to know this: In every forum where I’ve taught this material in person, without fail, nearly every hand in the room has shot into the air at these questions. I’ve seen Olympians, deans, tenured professors, major award winners, and authors of multiple books raise their hands at these questions.

When we enter a learning space, it’s easy to assume that we should check our fears at the door, or at least pretend they’re not there. But while you read, I’d like to propose instead that you make a little space next to you, no bigger than a small chicken or a large cupcake, for your fear to sit and join our exploration. Your fear is welcome, but it’s not in charge.

So how do we combat impostor syndrome? How do we slay the demons that cause us to doubt and undermine ourselves? In addition to maintaining perspective and cultivating community, another strategy, and probably why you’re reading this book, is to arm ourselves with information. What I’ve found in my years of studying pitching, both as a practitioner and as an instructor, is that, just as our identities and marginalities are culturally constructed, so too can the performance of confidence be constructed. There is actually a formula you can follow that builds on itself as a model of how to fake it until you make it. I’ve identified seven distinct and cumulative steps in performing confidence as a writer seeking work. They are as follows:

1. Generate an idea for a story! You cannot pitch or write a story until a small kernel of an idea sprouts in your mind. This is a hard, crucial part of the process, and it’s glib of me to write “generate an idea” as if it’s easy. Here are some questions I have sometimes used to develop story ideas:

On what subject could you walk into a bar right now and speak passionately and extemporaneously for twenty minutes? In other words, what are you an expert on?

What are your guiltiest pleasures? Why are they pleasurable to you? What makes you feel guilty for enjoying them?

What works of art (books, TV shows, films, videogames, and so on) have you read/watched/experienced more than twice? What keeps you coming back?

What story does your (or someone else’s) full name tell?

Two people have a conflict. Neither of them is wrong. What happens?

You perceived something you couldn’t name as a child. How would you name it now?

Most people misunderstand how a [process, place, trend, or ideology] works. How is it commonly misunderstood, and how does it really work?

2. Believe yourself to be qualified. This step is hard, and in my observation, it’s where most people drop out of the game. It can be strategically overstepped; it is possible to send a pitch without believing yourself to be qualified. But I recommend sending pitches from the mindset that you have the ability to write the story competently, that your writing has value, and that an editor or another gatekeeper might recognize this.

3. Identify who to contact about your idea. What kind of publication or editor might be interested in your story? This step requires reading, research, and networking, and you’ve probably already done more of it than you realize. Some great places to start: calls for pitches on X/Twitter, your favorite books’ acknowledgments pages, and the mastheads of your favorite publications.

4. Argue cogently for your idea. It’s not enough just to come up with an idea for a story; your pitch needs to demonstrate that you can execute on the story itself, that you’ve chosen its editorial target with care, and that the story will be relevant to that publication’s target audience. Your project here is, in essence, to make an argument for your argument.