pitching a story

I'd like to approach crafting a thesis the way I'd approach pitching a magazine story. I've written for websites, school newspapers, and school magazines. Typically, when you have an idea for a story, you brainstorm ideas, scrap the bad ones, and then dump your thoughts about the best two or three. After outlining what you want to say, then you can fill in the material with quotations from interviews, photography, and typeset it, and you're good to go!

Additionally, I have been contemplating a project to submit to Salt Lake magazine for a few months now, so if it's good enough, I may pitch it for real.

The post which I most want to elaborate is that on "Stegner & Setting." Right now, my ideas range from the macro to the micro. Here they are, in very rough form:

• retracing the steps Stegner describes both in his fiction and his essays. Using the framework of Philippe Hamon (private link) to talk about how we interact with the city
• adding the previous idea to the idea of memory (using the Sonnet 122 idea of "tables within the brain")
• Going even more specific: looking at one passage (maybe "something drastic had happened to Main Street"?), and relating that to urban planning and cultural memory of today (City Creek Mall, anyone?)
• one of my favorite ideas—the idea of created space. The funeral parlor in Recapitulation doesn't exist, and as far as I can tell, never did, although he gives a very specific address for it and it's easy to believe it could exist
• could always frame it as a travel writing piece—but isn't that more of a so-called staycation?

I like all these ideas, nebulous though they are. And honestly, this project started out as one part literary pilgrimage, one part excuse to eat doughnuts on South Temple. Gotta start somewhere!

All literary pilgrimages should involve petit fours.

(Once I move to Madison, I will be making a Crossing to Safety pilgrimage for sure.)