You're about to embark on an article-writing adventure.In this book, Don McKinney - editor, freelance writer, instructor - helps you work toward a higher quality of writing, to better your chances of placing articles with a higher quality of magazine.You'll begin with the idea. Article ideas are everywhere - but often buried, like mountains under molehills. McKinney helps you unearth yours and advises you in matching it to a magazine. And he shows you how to sell your article - before writing it - by creating a query letter sure to catch an editor by the imagination and intellect.Once you've got the nod, you'll talk to people and dig up information. Keeping the interview on track; the tape-or-notebook question; probing sensitive areas - McKinney helps you make these conversations count. He also ushers you into the library and to reference publications that will put you on the trail to facts you need. And he gives you an overview of computer databases and what's available on-line and on CD-ROM. Talk about saving time.And then, ready with the fruits of your research, armed with supporting comments, it's time to write. This book helps you by taking you into the very core of good wordsmithing. You'll learn about:Leads - the four basic functions your opening should serve, and four general categories of effective leads. You'll see how to grab your reader and yank him into your story. And how others, including E.B. White, Dave Barry and Frank DeFord, have done that.Endings - how to close your piece so that it rings in the reader's mind. You'll analyze ten types of finishes that McKinney identifies. Listen to the resonance in the samples of work by Shana Alexander, Saul Pett, John McPhee, Rex Reed and others.Structure - how to pound and knead and shape the agglomeration of information you've collected into a well-told tale. You'll learn about four types of article structure. And you'll see how, once you've got your story's elements in their proper places, to snug them up with transitions that make the reading smooth.Sparkle - that certain something that makes your writing stand out. Explore it, learn its ingredients through McKinney's narrative; watch it at work in the examples by W.C. \"Bill\" Heinz and Joan Didion and others. You'll see what separates average writing from good writing. This book will help you grasp it.In fact, this book will help you find your writing way in many ways, large and small.One of the larger ways is through a chapter devoted to helping you write the ever popular human-interest piece. You'll find out what kinds of articles editors seek - and why, if you meet someone with a true-drama tale, you should get the story and speed your query.Another chapter puts you onto, in McKinney's words, \"articles that anyone can write.\" You may have a wealth of material suitable for major magazines, right now, awaiting only your concentration and your fingers on the keys.Throughout this book, you'll find great writing examples. And in the back are profiles of accomplished magazine writers, including Maxine Rock, Barbara Raymond and Bil Gilbert; you'll gain a wealth of instruction through these essays. Following them, top editors - including Janet Chan of Redbook and Timothy Foote of Smithsonian - tell you what they want from writers.What do you want from yourself as a writer? To create solid, evocative articles? To place them in leading magazines? Of course you do.