Pitch Wars Blog Tour: Making the Big Edits: What I learned during Pitch Wars by T. C. Duck

Hey everyone!

Wow, it’s been *counts on fingers* eight years since my Pitch Wars class graduated. And what a time it’s been! Since the showcase in 2019, I’ve written three books, with my first adult novel, Spider Island, launching on BackerKit May 28th.

For those who don’t know, Pitch Wars is a mentorship competition. Unfortunately, the competition is no longer around. It died, along with most of book Twitter, but it’s still well respected in the industry. Many alumni have gone on to be best-sellers, but some never made it out of the query trenches. That was me, unfortunately. While Drum Corpse did well in the competition (I received 17 requests during the showcase, closing the manuscript at around 30 agent requests for the entire querying journey), I didn’t have any luck with it. And looking back, I can see why. Drum Corpse wasn’t my strongest manuscript, but it was an important book for me in terms of learning.

I might have had one of the biggest overhauls in the competition. I basically cut out everything after the first three chapters and rewrote the book from scratch. I actually ran out of time, having to quickly write an abridged ending that I’d end up changing later (another lesson from Pitch Wars: agents are way more chill than you think. Every agent who requested my full was willing to look at my new ending once I finished it, though it didn’t end up changing much in the end.) All this rewriting stemmed from one big issue—the book didn’t have a proper ending.

And to get to a satisfying ending, the project needed A LOT of work.

But first, let me tell you a little more about the project. Here’s the pitch.

Lady Octavia’s is not your average music school. At this academy, students are expected to master dangerous weapon-instrument hybrids, and Pitch’s mother, the late Sonata Remington, was the best drum major the school has ever known.

Twelve-year-old Pitch dreams of following in her mother’s footsteps. But when a competition for first chair threatens her place at the academy, Pitch must unravel the mysteries of her mother’s past to master the secrets hidden within her piccolo. The more Pitch investigates, the more she realizes that sinister forces haunt Lady Octavia’s halls, and Sonata might not have been a hero after all.

It was a good pitch, intriguing, with the promise of family drama, music battles, and mystery.

Problem is, the first versions of Drum Corpse didn’t really deliver on the premise. It was too bloated with a lot of sit-com-style drama: middle school crushes and low-stakes B plots revolving around friendships and tests. I never got to the meat of the story. I kept telling myself, “This is important character-building, I’ll get to the fun stuff in the next book.”

But when you’re saving all your cool scenes for future books, you end up with a book that isn’t very cool at all.

There’s a reason why agents like the phrase “stand alone with sequel potential”. In trad-publishing, you never know if you’re going to land that series deal. Stand-alones offer more flexibility when it comes to submitting to publishers. Also, when you shift your focus to telling a more succinct story, you often end up with a better book.

Writing all that filler wasn’t even enjoyable. The middle of the manuscript was a huge struggle for me during those early drafts before Pitch Wars. It’s like I could tell something was off, but I didn’t know what. The Drum Corpse in my head was a strange series, filled with magic instruments, evil muses, ghostly drum majors, and I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to pull some of those twists off. So I stalled. I created a book that was all set up and no payoff, and when I finally allowed myself to write those weird, exciting scenes, they fit right in—no complicated setup required. The final version might not have landed me an agent, but I swear, it was about a million times better than the bloated book I’d started with.

Drum Corpse isn’t a perfect book, but thanks to Pitch Wars and my amazing mentor Sabrina Kleckner, it’s one I’m immensely proud of. The competition pushed me to my limits. It taught me what I was capable of, and that confidence is probably the most important thing I gained during Pitch Wars.