A story begins with a pitch, and a good pitch is the foundation for those 400 frames that follow.

Tristen Rouse, Missouri Photo Workshop alum, pitched and began one story before pivoting to plan B — an idea that he said his faculty initially liked better.

Rouse is in his first year of the master’s program at the Missouri School of Journalism. Last year, he returned to Marshfield, Missouri to photograph the workshop, drawing on a classic MPW experience in a small town, while adhering to the new theme “Hometown Edition.”

A photo editor and a documentary photographer, Rouse has a few ideas of what makes a good pitch.

The following interview has been edited for length.

CM: What was your experience of pitching?

TR: Stressful. The most stressful part of the workshop for me was finding and pitching the story. I spent my first Sunday, Monday just driving around and seeing where things were in town. I ended up actually pitching something that got approved, and then once I started working on it, I backed out of it and found something else.

CM: What was your first idea?

TR: It had to do with one of the homecoming candidates at the local high school. I started working on it, but at the high school, I was not very satisfied with the COVID precautions. Students were asked to wear masks, but there was not any enforcement. Suddenly I was in crowded hallways full of mostly maskless teenagers. And I left and called my faculty and said I can't go back.

I ended up swiveling to a plan B pitch that we had talked about, which I later found out my faculty liked better in the first place. So plan B was the better option. I pitched that formally Tuesday afternoon, got it approved and started working on it Tuesday night.

CM: And what was plan B?

TR: Plan B was a local woman Samantha Cox who started a mural painting business. She had started a new job in the early part of 2020, and was not very far into it when COVID hit and she got furloughed. And she’s got a husband and they had a young son at home. With all this stressful stuff going on, she turned back to painting, which had always been an old passion of hers. She decided to try her hand at being a professional muralist, and she worked on a really high-profile mural along the center strip of town.

So I was able to do a story on her as a muralist, as well as her taking care of her son. We framed the story as those being her two big passions in life: painting and her son Bowen.

CM: What are the elements of a successful pitch?

TR: The two biggest things are good character and good access. Telling the story in such a short amount of time with such a limited number of frames, it's really about finding a person who you can connect with.

You also need access. I volunteered at the MPW in Boonville, and I saw stories fall apart because you had a photographer get really, really invested in someone but that person wasn't willing to give them the access.

When I met Samantha, I was essentially like, “Here's what I'm in town looking for. Can I be with you for 18 hours a day?” And she was fine with that, she thought it was interesting and something nice to be a part of. Or at least I hope she did.

A 27-year-old Dennis Dimick walked the downtown of Sleeper, Mo., with his camera in hand and a vision for his Lebanon 1978 Missouri Photo Workshop story. After two years of having his application denied, he was excited to start making images. Now, almost half of a century later, he digitally scans the film from his workshop and thinks, “I’m not sure it was a story.”

The MPW.30 participant had been trying to document the decline of small town downtowns due to large businesses moving into rural areas. Dimick photographed downtown Sleeper for days, but even now, he accredits the story’s failure to a lack of a central human subject.

“You’re wanting to use your camera as a tool to create a series of pictures that helps people understand that there is a principle character,” Dimick says. “The idea of trying to master it – that very simple concept of documenting a compelling character, overcoming obstacles to achieve a worthy outcome – that becomes a building block for much bigger things.”

Dimick says this “epiphany” would have helped him when coming up with a story to pitch to his faculty mentors at the time. Now that he has been a faculty member since 1995 himself, he wants his students to avoid the same mistake he made. He recalls a story that one of his MPW students in 2019 made about a jewelry store’s last week in business.

“I mean, we’re talking the last, final day,” Dimick says “That was the personification of the idea I had been trying to do 40 years earlier. [...] I had identified an important issue, but I hadn't come to grips with how I could effectively tell that story when I was pitching.”

If he could offer advice to MPW students today, it would be to find a character and not assume anything about them.

“Understanding the need for that kind of construct, even though mine didn’t succeed, that most certainly was the lesson I learned,” Dimick says. “I think that that's often what happens. It’s not necessarily the lessons you learned from the workshop that occur that week, and they may synthesize in you weeks or months later when you realize what it was that you were trying to be exposed to.”