Q. Can you give me a sample lesson right now? To my mind, the perfect literary form, is the joke:         Dumb Dora comes rushing home.          Dora: “Mom, mom, I’m afraid I’m pregnant!”          Mom: “You sure it’s yours?” Why did you just laugh? Because I’ve told you a story, not from A to Z, but from A to Y, and you provided the resolving Z out of your own experience: I allowed you to jump the gap, and read between the lines. (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, and I knew what you were thinking. The pleasure you felt was the shock of recognition, and the laugh came out as your acknowledgement to me of that pleasure (unifying us once again). All because I showed you a dramatic moment, but did not tell you what it meant.  One year, after a trip to see James Jones in Paris, Don Fine, Editor-in-Chief for Dell/Delacorte made occasion to fly down to Rome (where I was living) for a tough talk. A close friend and (alas) drinking companion, he had signed me to a contract to write, The Palace of Money. A novel he later published, but right then, he was not happy with the quality of the prose.  “From Flaubert to Hemingway,” said Don (who later started two big New York publishing companies on the strength of his ability to find talented and new a meaning low-cost writers). The first lesson in contemporary writing is: Show, Don’t Tell.   “When you see the work of a beginning painter,” he went on, “you know how there’s something raw and naive about the colors? When I read a new writer, if the prose has that raw and naive sound, if it tells rather than shows;a that’s two strikes before I even begin to think about the story.” “But if you have a killer story,” I objected, “with a lot of suspense, doesn’t that carry the reader along?” “Let’s say,” said Don, “that Frank Sinatra sings “Night and Day,” and then I sing it too. We’re both telling the same ‘story,’ but you would never buy my version, would you? In writing, he finished with an old slogan I’ll never forget: “It ain’t what you do but the way that you do it.” “Show, Don’t Tell, is the first lesson I teach. Finding narrative strategies, constructing sentences and paragraphs to seduce the reader into becoming your collaborator, and completing the emotion of the story out of his/her own understanding of what you have not said. “Dramatize, dramatize!” said Henry James and T.S. Eliot called it finding “the objective correlative.” It sounds easy. It is counter-intuitive and not, but it can be taught and learned.

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