First of all: a big congratulations ought to be passed around to everyone who's gotten through the pitching process! Or cupcakes. They're basically the same. Or at least, they both start with C.
Anyway. The pitching process most certainly helped me pare down the wide and whimsical realm that was my initial podcast topic: "boredom and creativity." Having a specific audience in mind (a professional production team) and knowing I only had four minutes to describe my idea was incredibly useful in helping me realize just how focused I had to be. Without even consciously realizing what I was doing, I was narrowing my topic as I was writing. I went from "links between boredom and creativity" to "ways technology has impacted our ability to be bored -- and, consequently, create." When I dug into the Spark podcast archive for more examples, I happened to stumble across a past episode that actually talked about the intersection between creativity and technology: this helped me refine my topic even more, because I had to distinguish my podcast from the previous. If that podcast already covered kids' creativity, then I should focus on ways adults experience and respond to boredom in light of the digital age.
Was this a useful exercise, then? Most definitely. And I can see the value of the pitch as a prewriting exercise for other assignments -- especially as a journalism student. Freelancing is a huge part of being any kind of writer, and the pitch plays a crucial role in that as well: you have to sell your article to a publication's editor, and writing a pitch sometimes feels like writing an entire article in itself. But the process is invaluable: it's easy to keep an idea upstairs in the vague and wispy world of thoughts -- bringing that idea down into tangible form inherently forces you to define it, to focus it, and to make it communicable.
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