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‘It was Lindy. She was helping my dad wash his car.’ Illustration by Kristin Trayer, 11, for “Lindy'” by Ari Rubin, 11. Published in Stone Soup, May/June 1993 and The Stone Soup Book of Friendship Stories, 2018. A Note from Jane Levi Writers are always looking for advice and ideas about how to make their writing better. One piece of advice I’ve heard and read often is “show, don’t tell.” I understood the general idea that it’s more powerful to reveal things to the reader through action and dialogue, instead of listing and explaining all the underlying thoughts and feelings in the order they happen. But I’ve sometimes worried that this approach might make my writing a bit too flowery or overly descriptive. Then, when I was working on the revised version of The Stone Soup Book of Friendship Stories, I read this week’s story: “Lindy.” This story was written by 11-year-old Ari Rubin and published in Stone Soup 26 years ago! Suddenly, reading this apparently simple and sparingly told story, “show, don’t tell” made a lot more sense. The whole story is “told” to us by a strong narrator’s voice. But he doesn’t explicitly tell us the real story underneath the story. He shows us the various events as they happened to him, so that—like him—we don’t understand Lindy’s bigger story until the very end. Then, we notice all the hints dropped along the way. We see the journey the narrator has been on, and how he got to where he is now in terms of his feelings about Lindy. This approach makes you want to read the story again. And then you see that the clues were there, cleverly laced in to the narrative. I love this story. It makes me cry every time I read it. But don’t let that put you off! It might just be me being sentimental! I am sure that however your emotions respond to “Lindy,” you’ll be excited to see how the author brilliantly controls what he shows us, what he tells us, how, and when, to make a complex emotional tale so simple and matter-of-fact. If you read something you love in Stone Soup, then do write and tell us about it, or leave a comment on our website. And, of course, if you are inspired by “Lindy” (or anything else in Stone Soup) to write or make something you want to share, please send that to us too! Until next time, Contests and partnership news Congratulations to our podcast contest winners! This week we announced the winners in our writing for podcast contest. Congratulations to Olivia Park, 12 (1st place), Claire Nagle, 12 (2nd Place), Tara Prakash, 12 (3rd place), and our two honorable mentions: Gemma Yin, 11, and Sabrina Guo, 13. You can read more about the winners and their prizes here. Announcing our Summer Book-Writing Contest We are thrilled to announce a summer contest for book-length writing in all forms and genres by kids aged 14 and under. (We have extended our usual age limit for this contest). The deadline for entries is August 15, so you have the whole summer to work on perfecting your book, whether it is a novel, a collection of poetry or short stories, a memoir, or other prose. There will be three placed winners, and we will publish all three winning books in various forms. Visit our contest page and Submittable entry page for full details. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Abhi, one of our frequent contributors, recently won a national award for his short film. We’ve published it on our YouTube channel and featured it on our blog. The short film is called “An Unusual Sunday.” Watch it here. On Thursday we published a piece by blogger Maya Viswanathan called “My Fancy Cake.” Maya describes the experience of designing the cake for her Bat Mitzvah. Should she go with her gut feeling about the colors for the cake, or follow the advice of others? To find out, read her piece. From Stone Soup May/June 1993 Lindy By Ari Rubin, 11 Illustrated by Kristin Trayer, 11 I used to cringe each time our doorbell rang. Nine times out of ten the person on the other side of the door was Lindy, the girl from a few houses down the street. “Can you play today?” she’d ask. “No, I’m doing homework,” I’d say, even if I wasn’t. “Can I help your mom with the baby?” she would ask next. Before I could say no, there was my mom inviting her inside again. “Where’s the baby?” Lindy asked. She asked that same question every time she walked inside the house. And the answer was always the same. “He’s in the family room,” my mom would say, smiling as she watched me silently mouthing the words along with her. My baby brother, Kelly, liked Lindy. He liked her a little too much, if you asked me. He’d squeal and laugh when she made silly faces at him or tickled his feet. To make matters worse, whenever Lindy played with Kelly, she’d take out every one of his toys. You can guess who would have to put them away later on. While she was busy with Kelly and my mom, I’d sneak out of the room. But no matter where I went, Lindy soon found me. It was as though she had radar. “I’m bored,” she’d say. Why don’t you go home, then? I thought to myself, but I never could say it out loud. Most of the time she would just stand there and stare at me until I asked her to play Nintendo. She would talk and talk all through the game, especially when it was my turn to play. She talked so much that it ruined my concentration. I lost a lot of lives that way. If she had not been such a pest, I might have liked her visits. After all, she was quite

“Fruits Like Heaven,” painting by Christian W. Wagari, 11. Published January 2018. A note from William Rubel I have a project for you today, but I want to start by addressing the adult newsletter readers. To our adult newsletter readers Amazon has a program called Amazon Smile that gives to a US charity on our behalf every time we buy something. It costs us nothing. Here is how it works: You do your shopping at smile.amazon.com and then Amazon donates half a percent (0.5%) of the total you just spent to your selected charity. If you click on the links above, then your half a percent will go to us at the Children’s Art Foundation. This is the quintessential Stone Soupproject. If just one of you starts using Amazon Smile not much good comes of it. But when every one of you starts using it, the amount we receive will be significant. Thank you. And, of course, the greatest help of all is to subscribe. William’s Weekend Project Life doesn’t always go as we expect it to. I am not one who is big on sports analogies—but in many cases, the expression “Life threw a curveball” provides a good analogy for an unexpected outcome. A curveball, for those of you who don’t know, is a baseball pitch that starts out going straight but then unexpectedly veers off to the right or the left. The story “Sketches,” which you will find below from the January 2018 issue, is a story that throws a curveball. You cannot imagine from how the story starts that it will end up where it does. This weekend, I want you to write a story that starts out seeming to go in one direction, to have one plot line, one mood, and then for the story to suddenly change directions. Write a story that take us somewhere we couldn’t have imagined at the beginning. “Sketches” opens with a routine argument between two brothers but ends up taking us somewhere else entirely. This is a common structure for stories—after all, the shift to the unexpected is almost the definition of what makes a good story. You’d be a pretty boring storyteller if the stories you tell your friends all turned out exactly as they had expected! Sleeping Beauty is another example of a story with a curveball plot. It starts out at a party celebrating the birth of a princess with the “happily ever after” plot we all expect a princess’s life to follow, and then: Bam! The evil fairy, named Carabosse in the ballet version and Maleficent in the Disney version, pushes the princess’s life in an unexpected direction, making a much more exciting story in the process. Send us your finished story when you are done. Until next week, Get ready for a summer of reading with a Stone Soup subscription The school year is coming to a close. For those of you who don’t yet have a Stone Soup subscription, this is a good time to start one. Summer vacation is a great time for reading, thinking, dreaming, and getting into projects one doesn’t have time for during the school year. Besides, you can’t get fully immersed into the inspired and inspiring worlds conjured up by Stone Soup’s writers without being a subscriber. Eleven issues a year. Available as print or digital formats. Plus, with the online format, you get over 20 years’ worth of back issues, writing and art projects, our fabulous blog writers, and more. Highlights from the past week online Don’t miss the latest content from our Book Reviewers and Young Bloggers at Stonesoup.com. Vandana reviews Wendy Mass’s Finally. The main character, Rory, is about to turn twelve. Here’s what Vandana has to say about the book: “Frank, funny, and full of surprises, Finally is a story that spins many themes together, and consequently appeals to a wide range of readers. For one, it portrays the pressure to grow up before one might be ready, which nearly every middle schooler experiences at some point in their life.” Read more here. Alex Baker, a writing instructor for the youth writing group Igniting Writing, wrote a guest post on our blog this week about some strategies to engage young writers. Some of his suggestions include games and fun writing prompts. Do you have any ideas? Let us know by leaving a comment on the post! From Stone Soup January 2018 Sketches By Saenger Breen, 12 Painting by Christian W. Wagari, 11 That morning at breakfast, Dylan sat perched on his usual seat at the table, sketching happily. I grabbed the milk and a spoon and sat down. I poured myself a heaping bowl of Cheerios, most of which spilled on the table. Dylan’s pencil scribbled away, and he periodically blew huge breaths over his paper to get rid of the shreds of eraser. Curious about what he was working so diligently at, I leaned over to get a better view. “Dylan!” I shouted. He was adding onto one of my drawings, and had already reshaped a good portion of it. Startled, Dylan looked up. “What?” “I’ve been working on that forever!” I snatched my notebook out of his hands. He’d made the people cartoon-like and unrealistic, and shaded in all the wrong places. “You totally screwed up the whole thing!” I yelled. “I didn’t screw up anything!” he said, defensively. “I’ve told you a million times not to touch my stuff, and specifically not my sketchbook!” I flipped through the pages to see if he’d ruined any other drawings. He hadn’t. I flipped back to the drawing he was working on. I examined it closely, looking for flaws to point out. The faces of the people had become less dimensional and smudgy. Dylan always drew details with tons of shading, most of which wasn’t necessary. Sometimes I’d teach him where to shade, and help him with drawing figures, but he still resorted to his box-like, over-shaded style. He’d added onto drawings before, but those were just sketches I’d whipped up in a few minutes. I’d been perfecting this one for at least a month. The paper