Should I Pitch my Pilot or Write It?

Also in this week’s questions: My scenes feel slow and drag on to the next plot point.

Newsletter #3 - September 15th 2025

Happy Monday everyone,

Here’s last weeks newsletter., and thanks so much for sending your questions. I’ll admit the week started with no questions – and had started to sweat a little for a moment.

As always I post last weeks newsletter here on my blog, if you want the answers to your questions sooner... why not subscribe.

QUESTION 1

Another one from LEE in the UK

On a recent video I watched, Shonda Rhimes of Scandal and Grey’s Anatomy fame suggested the pitch comes before the writing. If that’s the case, am I wrong / wasting time writing pilots and episodes of shows? Should I be pumping out pitch ideas for shows I’ve not even started to write yet?

I do appreciate that someone like Shonda will probably get the green light off a pitch but is it the same for the rest of us?

Thank you, Lee, for another great question, the timing could not have been better, as yours came in when I was starting to worry, that there wouldn’t be any questions this week.

So, about your pitching. I think the answer lies in where what she actually means by pitch comes before writing. If it means, you must pitch and sell your show before you ever write it. The answer to your questions is pretty straightforward.

If you have access to a good producer, you are a known entity that they could trust to deliver what you pitched – then yes that approach can be a time saver. A good producer will know what can be sold on the market and get produced. If you have their ear, you can pitch them your idea – and save yourself some time. Maybe the idea is good, but there is no market for it. You then might want to do something else.

But let’s say you don’t have those things, access to a producer / and a proven record of being able to execute your pitch.

Then I would say – you should write your pilot. You then need to be able to pitch, and by having the script written, prove you can execute.

But Shonda, being a very smart and accomplished writer could also be meaning, is that it’s useful to pitch your show, to friends or better yet, people who are also writing, to see if the idea catches their imagination. Because often, when you see people losing concentration in your pitch – that’s a pretty good indication that there may be something wrong with your premise.

Something you can work on, before spending a lot of time writing out your pilot. My suggestion here, is train people you know and trust to be absolutely honest with you, so they can tell you when your new idea might not be the best.

I for example, just told my friend a new idea of mine, a horror tv thing that has to do with aspects of religion – and he picked up, that I was just using aspect from one religion, and that would be a problem.

And that note, really got my pitch to the next level, I could have spent a lot of time developing something, not realising it had a nearly fatal flaw.

Good luck with your writing,

Ps. Small side note, do write your pilots, but I suggest not writing any more episodes at the spec stage. The pilot should be enough at the spec stage, and your time is better used writing a new pilot rather than multiple episodes.

QUESTION 2

From Jordan in the USA

How do you handle it when your story hits a slow patch - when you know what to write, but it feels like the scenes are just dragging because you’re only setting up what’s supposed to happen next?

Hey, Jordan. I love this question.

So, I am going to assume that you already have an outlie you are working from. And I guessing you might have used one the structure methods – whatever works for you – that are out there.

And now you’ve hit a wall. It’s a wall that I’ve crashed into several times when I was starting out.

My suspicion if your are anything like me, you’ve outlined your story, following one of the structure methods to keep yourself on track. And even though you are hitting all the key beats in that particular method (save the cat was my absolute favourite) the scenes between the key beats feel slow, boring and just providing setup for those key moments coming up.

I think this is most common in either, the first 10 pages leading up to an inciting incident, or just past the midpoint.

And what is happening, is that by focusing on getting those point and structure right, you have forgot (I’ve done this a million times) what makes a film/tv so much fun. It’s the scenes.

And by focusing on the key beats, we can forget the audience. Sure, we’re giving them setups in all the right places, but the journey has become slow.

My journey in figuring this out – has been working towards continually thinking about audience engagement, how am I at any point keeping the audience engaged in the story. You can do some minor fixes, make a scene funny, or add extra layers – but I find what helps the most is to really dig into this question:

What does the audience need to know? What is making them curios, what questions has your story posed – that layers all the scenes until that question is answered.

If you do that, you’ll never have a dull or a slow scene. And when you do, you don’t have to make a single question last a whole act, it can last 4 scenes.

Hope that helps, may all your scenes be engaging.

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