The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools “You’re my person.” Cristina Yang says to Meredith Grey in Grey’s Anatomy. People forget that she’s talking about paperwork. Cristina has scheduled a medical procedure. The clinic won’t confirm the appointment without an emergency contact, and she put down Meredith. That’s the origin of the phrase. It has since been annexed by romantic couples, but it was coined...
13 days ago • 6 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools Today is Just Because Day! Do something for no reason today. Wear mismatched socks. Have dessert before dinner. Take an unplanned drive. Writers are terrible at spontaneity. We have trained ourselves to make everything count. The hour has to produce pages, the trip has to be research, the movie has to be studied. Even our rest gets justified. We call it filling...
20 days ago • 3 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools Last week we talked about how old and new friendships are structured differently — how you build a bond from zero, and how you fake twenty years of history with a McDonald’s pickle. This week we’re drilling down and talking about men’s friendships, which come in three flavors. The buddy action movie is about a mission. Two guys, one problem, and a friendship...
27 days ago • 5 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools New Friends vs Old Friends Last week we made the case that best friend love is a story engine. It comes with three ingredients, an arc, and hands you a bond that doubles as your plot. Best friend stories are not one thing. A story about two women who have known each other since high school (Romy and Michelle’s High School Reunion) is doing something structurally...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools Two of the biggest things streaming on Prime Video right now are love stories. Neither one has a kiss in it. Best friends are one of our life's central relationships. Stories showcasing best friendships are automatically emotional and high stakes. Project Hail Mary (2026) is about a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone eleven light-years from Earth,...
about 1 month ago • 6 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools How I use Claude to whip a manuscript into shape before a human sees it Think of a developmental edit as the big-picture, is-this-working pass. It is the first step when you’re getting feedback. Does the story hold together? Does the pacing hum? Are the characters fully formed? Fix this layer first, and every other edit gets easier. You can get a developmental...
about 2 months ago • 5 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools In 1979, a script reader named Syd Field wrote the first, and for a long time the only book about screenplay structure called Screenplay. He called his approach the Paradigm. Screenwriters built careers on it. Studio executives focused on it. Novelists quietly stole it. And nearly fifty years later it still works because it isn't a formula. It's a map of how...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools Last week, we met the mirror moment — James Scott Bell’s name for the beat at the center of your story where the protagonist looks at himself and reckons with who he is or the odds he faces. Today we walk through Bell’s story brainstorming technique, using the mirror moment to build your story from the middle. It sounds backwards, but it works like magic. Here’s...
2 months ago • 4 min read
The Pitch Master Newsletter Weekly craft and career fuel for screenwriters and novelists with creativity tips and storytelling tools The Mirror Moment: The Secret at the Center of Your Story A few weeks ago, something wonderful happened in my comments section. I published a post on The Kill Zone blog and James Scott Bell — bestselling thriller writer, craft teacher, and fellow Kill Zone contributor — stopped by to add a layer about character I had never heard of before. He called it the...
2 months ago • 5 min read