Trial by Pitch Deck

At some point in the dead of night, somewhere between exporting the fourth version of your mood board and repeatedly googling “What is the essence of a great logline?” to assess any gaps in your approach - you begin to suspect this isn’t really about storytelling anymore.

This is survival.

This is caffeine and chaos.

This is Project: Keep the Dream Alive, powered by intravenous coffee and a pair of toothpicks to hold your eyelids open.

You were once a writer with a vision.

Now you’re an underpaid production assistant in your own brain.

A designer.

A data analyst.

A battle-hardened veteran of the Canva frontlines.

It’s late. You’re muttering to yourself in three different fonts.

You’re dangerously close to crying,

And yet - you persist.

Because somewhere in the madness of pitch decks and PDF compression limits,

you still believe in the story.

Whack on a fresh pot of coffee, it’s going to be a long night.

Welcome back.

Late Night Musings with Rogues & Scoundrels

It’s not enough to have a good idea.

No, no. You must prove it.

Justify it.

Cross-reference it against international market trends and case studies from 2019.

It is show business after all.

You must craft a full-blown defence strategy like your story’s on trial for its life.

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, please refer to Exhibit D - the two-page character breakdown of our protagonist, who is both haunted and healing.

As you’ll see from the SWOT analysis in Appendix 3, this idea is not only viable - it is a cultural phoenix, rising from the ashes of genre conformity…”

And so begins the descent.

You start the application wide-eyed, caffeinated and full of promise.

You believe in your idea.

It is original. Visceral. Beautiful.

The kind of story that haunts people in a good way.

Then the form opens and asks you to explain your “Project Overview” in 100 words or less… and you immediately forget what your story is even about.

Next comes the pitch deck.

Canva is your temple now.

You spend eight hours nudging one photo of a misty road into a position that feels “vaguely metaphorical.”

You agonise over font pairings like you’re selecting names for your unborn children.

Every colour swatch becomes a philosophical debate.

You lie on the floor for 17 minutes debating whether your title slide should have movement. You get up.

You move it.

You hate it.

You move it back.

You weep quietly into a cushion.

Then there’s the treatment.

Oh, the treatment. The sacred scroll.

The blueprint.

The cursed bible that demands you summarise your sprawling, complex, genre-defying masterpiece into five digestible pages with clarity, tone, theme, market positioning, AND world-building.

You do your best.

You rewrite the logline 11 times.

You Google “difference between synopsis and summary.”

You delete sentences that took you four hours to write because you suddenly doubt whether they’re “clear” or “insufferably poetic.”

At some point, your partner offers you food and you hiss at them like a raccoon because you’re mid-keyboard trance and forgot what sunlight is.

Then comes the research spiral.

Who is your audience?

What streaming trends apply?

You devour data.

You convince yourself this story can be cross-platform, socially relevant and “highly exportable.”

You believe.

Then you doubt.

Then you believe again.

You finish everything.

Finally.

And then… the upload portal fails to accept PDFs larger than 10MB.

You compress.

You cry.

You upload.

Submit.

The word appears in bold.

Your cursor hovers.

You hold your breath.

You hit the button.

And just like that - it’s out of your hands.

Your idea, your baby, your beautiful fever dream of a narrative - is now flung into the gladiator pit, where it must fight a thousand other brilliant, desperate stories armed with mood boards, case studies and hopes as fragile as overcooked pasta.

And then?

Silence.

The wait begins.

The gentle existential thrum of what now?

You try to write something else.

You refresh your inbox.

You question your life choices.

You get a rejection.

You get a shortlist.

You get nothing.

You start again.

Because we’re not just writers.

We are strategists, designers, economists, publicists, philosophers and nightshift warriors.

We are the over-prepared and under-rested.

The ones who keep going.

Even when it feels impossible.

Even when the paperwork is stacked against us.

We stay up, not because we want to - but because we have to.

Because somewhere in the chaos of templates and funding guidelines and grant portal passwords we forgot years ago… we still believe in the story.

Even when it’s on trial.

Especially then.