Anatomy of a Pitch: The Man Who Swam the Panama Canal

This isn’t a “Medium Story” so much as it is a look at a pitch for a more complete story that I routinely send out to magazines and publications.

For more of my Anatomy of a Pitch series, read here on my Patreon.

Anatomy of a Pitch:

I’ve always been fascinated with the life of Richard Haliburton since my dad got me a book of his travel writings on my 10thbirthday (my dad got it on his 10th birthday and he wanted to continue the tradition. The books, published in the late 1930s is old enough to make him obscure enough for a really good pitch,

Born in Memphis to upper-middle-class parents, Haliburton went to Princeton University where he read a quote by Oscar Wilde (like Wilde, Halliburton was also closeted stories about “margianalized” communities are in style now, so lean into those angles. I didn’t want to make it my whole story) and was inspired not to settle for a life of ordinariness. He became one of the legendary travel writers and lecturers of the 1920s and 1930s from having lived some of the richest experiences of any person on the globe at the time In many ways, this paragraph follows standardized human interest journalism formula. Start with a paragraph that’s anecdotal. Then in this second sentence, put in the nuts and bolts of the story. Ironically, despite his wealth, he vowed to travel as cheaply as possible and had a reputation in India for dodging train fares I love this detail, came from deeper research, and paints the guy…