A few entries ago I mentioned the John Vorhaus comedy writing workshop and how I pitched a film in a way that taught me a lot about pitching. I never got back to that.

Granted, there was not exactly a groundswell of e-mail demanding that I explain myself, but ah, what the hell.

Vorhaus does something clever with this exercise. He has invented an entire fictional country, Gravaslava, with its own ethnic groups and culture of stock character stereotypes, history, holidays, you name it. (He will in fact, if you ask nicely, sing the Gravaslavan national anthem, traditionally done with one hand over your heart and the other over your crotch.) You're supposed to pitch your idea to Gravaslavan producers, flush with cash from foreign aid and eager to produce something that would appeal specifically to a Gravaslavan audience.

WTF? you ask? Why go to all this trouble?

Because, instead of having all of reality to worry about - and promptly get lost in - you have a specific set of variables to mess around with. You have to address the country's ethnic divide between stereotypical rootless, lazy, free-thinking Koalagens and hard-working, closed-minded Gnashtics. It's expected that some variation on the stock character of the "bupkek," a naive country oaf with delusions of grandeur, will appear. Etc. Etc.

The effect of all this is to narrow the field, not such that all decisions are made for you, but to the point where you have some rough form to work with instead of just floundering around in an endless sea of possibility.

So my movie was called 31 Nights in Fstoppa. It was built around one of the notes, that the wheels of business and government pretty much grind to a halt in August while everyone flees the oppressive heat of the capital for the seaside resort of Fstoppa.

My plot was a rather complicated, screwballish kind of thing. It involved a Gnashtic girl who wants to marry a boy from a wealthy Gnashtic family - that has a longstanding tradition stating the men of the family must take Koalagen wives. She goes off with the prospective in-laws to Fstoppa for August, masquerading as a Koalagen in order to win their approval. The mother, being Koalagen herself, sees through this immediately, but likes the idea of putting one over on her stuffy husband and helps the girl. There's a bupkek private detective, a subplot about a politician, for whom the mother's planning a huge charity ball, who isn't what he appears to be either, the son changes his mind about marrying the girl and is trying to discreetly blow her cover so he doesn't have to go through the embarrassment of dumping her, a Koalagen artist who's interested in the girl...

Okay, it was complicated as hell. This is a longstanding problem for me. And seeing as I only had a very limited number of words to work with, I used them explaining the story. These were the densest words I could use. They carried more information per sentence than if I had talked about other aspects of the story.

As it happens, this was a mistake. Vorhaus loved my title, but said in some ways my pitch worked against it. Offering up a title like 31 Nights in Fstoppa suggests glitz and sex and glamour. Fast cars pulling up to high society balls. Gorgeous people in evening wear. Trendy nightclubs, music, sexy young people dancing in various states of undress. Now all of that was in the idea as I conceived it. But it wasn't in the pitch because it was less information dense than my complicated storyline. (I wish I'd thought to pitch it as Meet the Parents in Cancun...)

Lesson learned: get the important parts of the experience across, not just the parts that seem to require the most explanation. Frankly, what would have sold the movie was that tone, and the plot probably would have been rewritten beyond recognition by the time it was done anyway.

So there's a valuable tip for you, in case it proves useful someday.

Oh, and apropos of nothing, according to The Economist, China consumed fully half of the planet's cement production last year, 30 percent of its coal, 36 percent of its steel. Does anybody even want to argue that the world can handle 1.3 billion Chinese deciding it's their turn to live like 20th century Americans? If nothing else, that's almost 900 million cars sucking down oil and pumping CO into the air.

Something's got to give...