Writing to Get Published Student's Handbook

This is a free book that I give my writing students. It goes out by email attachment when they ask for it. Here is Page One: RULE #1. Show, Don’t Tell (or: let us read what you mean between the lines) In the kind of writing most likely to bring you the attention of a New York publisher, the perfect literary form is the joke. Dumb Dora comes rushing home, frightened. Dora: “Mom, mom, I’m pregnant!” Mom: “You sure it’s yours?” Why did you just laugh? I’ve told you a story, not from A to Z but only up to XY, told it so you provided the resolving Z out of your own experience. I did not tell you the emotions going on between mother and daughter. Reading “between the lines,” you laughed because you had just figured that out for yourself. (All this without an unnecessary word.) For one existential moment, the loneliness of being forever locked into your own consciousness was eased: you knew what I was thinking; I knew what you were thinking. The pleasure you felt was the shock of recognition, and your laugh was acknowledgement to me of that pleasure (unifying us once again). Let’s say that I sing, “Night and Day.” Then Frank Sinatra sings it. We’re both telling the same “story.” But what a difference. This is the most important lesson I know in the art of writing: it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it.