How a Pitch Comes Together

Passing it On

I’ve always had the tools to be a professional writer. I’m a content writer for my day job, hold an English degree, and I’m confident in my writing ability. However, I’d constantly develop a strong case of imposter syndrome when pitching legitimate publications. 

While I felt like I had the tools, I needed someone to tell me it was ok to use them and needed someone to provide some guidance on what resonates with editors, which is why I consider the journalism class I took with Abby Ronner at the Flatiron Writer’s Room where I live in Asheville, NC to be one of the best investments I’ve ever made. Ronner, an accomplished writer, gave me the confidence and tools to pitch my stories, and since then, in the span of a year, I’ve been published in GQ, Fast Company, and in Slate 3 times just throughout this summer. 

When I designed my website, I wanted to be very upfront with my journey to written success. 

One complaint I have of so many writer’s websites and personal brands is that they’re startlingly sparse, and I’d hazard a guess that much of that is by design; freelance writing is not for the faint of heart, and months of success can be followed by months of…nothing. I also think it’s a bit of a defense mechanism; a lot of getting published is based on connections and who you know, and that’s not necessarily something you want advertised. 

I never wanted to do that. I don’t want to give off the impression that I arrived at this Squarespace site fully formed as a writer and not give insights into how long of a journey it took to arrive here. I also wanted to pass on the confidence and tools Ronner passed onto me, which is a very longwinded way of saying I’ve wanted to do a piece for a while about how a good pitch comes together, evolves, and finally results in an editor giving you a paid gig in a legit publication. 

In My Experience, the Best Ideas Gestate Upstairs For a While

Jia Tolentino’s 2019 piece, The Age of Instagram Face, has always stuck with me for some reason—I think the algorithmic rewarding of banality social media perpetuates has always fascinated me—and something I’ve long thought about when browsing Instagram (something I admittedly spend way too much time doing) and realizing that many of the men whose jobs seem to be (or are) being perpetually online (in her piece, Tolentino refers to them as the “professionally beautiful”), look strangely interchangeable: the same high cheekbones, same chiseled jawline, and same hollow cheeks. 

Cosmetic procedures—and the coverage surrounding them—have, until somewhat recently, been relegated to the female lens, but for us paying attention—like me, an early adopter of Nip/Tuck, and someone who thinks about the man who got calf implants on MTV’s True Life more than once a year—we know that men are optimizing almost just as much as women.

And thus, the kernels of a pitch started rattling around my brain. 

A Good Pitch Has An Interesting Angle 

I pitched around a piece on “The Rise in Male Plastic Surgery” last spring when comedian Matt Rife started dominating headlines due to a very misogynistic Netflix special. What was only typically mentioned—and what I lead my pitch with—is that Matt Rife has a very different-looking face than when he first started out. He has what I mentioned noticing in the previous section of this piece—male Instagram face—though I didn’t call it that in the pitch, which didn’t get picked up by anyone because other than centering the pitch around a celebrity in the zeitgeist—which, admittedly, can sometimes work—it didn’t have a ton new to say. 

Male Plastic Surgery Starts Making Headlines

The thing is, the increase in male plastic surgery had started entering the discourse, and so to make my pitch interesting, I should’ve had a different angle other than simply “it’s on the rise.” 

For example, I could’ve talked about how the rumors about Rife were interesting since he’s built his brand on being a very masc, alpha, manly-man bro, the kind that wants you to think they don’t care about cosmetic aesthetics, but often very much do. That’s an interesting angle. 

I could’ve also done a pitch on the lengths some men will go to to project a super alpha, manly masculinity, which is interesting, but If I’d done my homework, I’d have seen that it’d already been tackled by other publications.

I also needed to remember to ask myself whether or not people care about men altering their faces. Ultimately, I think they do (which is why the pitch I ended up going with resonated with the editor, who said yes), but it bears mentioning. When crafting pitches, ask yourself if an audience would care and why they’d care to hear about it from a specific publication (or…section in said publication). 

It’s Not Just Plastic Surgery—It's Specifically Non-Invasive Cosmetic Procedures, and It’s Not Just Celebrities—It’s Regular Guys With Regular Jobs…And That’s The Angle! 

Earlier this summer, an acquaintance I followed on Instagram posted a story about him getting Botox treatments and tagged his MedSpa, thanking them for keeping his “face fresh.” Always ready to go down an Instagram rabbit hole, I followed the link to said med spa and started scrolling. Lo and behold, he was featured on their main page, with a before and after shot showcasing that prior to this Botox update, he’d been the recipient of some very judicial jawline filtering. 

This man was not born with the news anchor jaw I’d always known him to have, which was fascinating to me. I did some research and found that many men are getting jawlines courtesy of Juvederm, and while, like traditional plastic surgery, it’s still somewhat pricey—packages typically start at around $2,000—the non-invasive nature of fillers means there’s almost no recovery time. To paraphrase a line from the article I ended up writing, I could conceivably get a Ryan Gosling-inspired jawline over my lunch break. 

The everyday nature of this guy I know quickly and efficiently augmenting his face got me pitch-brain racing again, and this time, I had a better angle: Men Now Have Instagram Faces, Too. I wanted to create a companion piece to Tolentino’s, focusing on men and how social media has made being a personal brand accessible and thus made the need to keep said personal brand fresh a priority for women and men. 

I decided to go the social media/personal branding route because I knew I wanted to pitch the piece to Katie Krzaczek at Slate, with whom I’d just written another piece. I enjoyed the collaborative nature of her editorial guidance and thought she’d get where I was going with the piece. I decided to go the social media/personal branding route because Katie edits the business section, and that’s an angle that works for a business section. 

Luckily, Katie did like the pitch but wanted it to find more focus. As she pointed out, Slate had done some reporting already on male plastic surgery, including sending a guy into an office to do a consultation. So, while she liked the Instagram angle, she also wondered what it said about society, what we consume, or masculinity. I sat with her suggestions and decided the actual focus wouldn’t just be that men now have Instagram faces, but that everyday guys can achieve because of the rise in non-invasive procedures. 

While the Slate reported visited a fancy Upper East Side surgeon’s, I pitched that I visit a strip-mall medspa (I hope it’s behind a Bojangles, I wrote in that email…it wasn’t) to showcase the juxtaposition between celebrities and influencers and everyday guys cosmetic augmentation experiences. She liked that, so accepted the pitch, and I got to work (and ended up saying something about the state of masculinity, but that came after the reporting). 

I hope that’s helpful for anyone wondering how a pitch comes together. I also hope you like the finished piece if you’d be so obliged to check it out.