• Zadie Smith on writing and dancing is an unalloyed delight.
• Last week, Daniel José Older and Jackie Woodson discussed representation in young adult literature and our new political reality, among many other topics -- a sensitive, honest, and frequently laugh-out-loud conversation.
• This essay by Jason Low does something rare in all of our discussions about diversity:  It offers an inside-the-publishing-house view of how and why publishers select manuscripts, particularly diverse ones, and why those projects sometimes turn out badly. (If you read the comments, skip the ones involving Michael Grant.) 
• It is November, therefore you need a good veggie chili recipe. Done and done.
• In 1968, Muriel Rukeyser published a "Poem" we all can use now:

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, 

The news would pour out of various devices 

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. 

I would call my friends on other devices; 

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. 

Slowly I would get to pen and paper . . . 

Q. Any advice you can give on show vs. tell would be immensely helpful!

A. I write about this in The Magic Words on pages 85, 89-90, 220, and 311, among other places; but here are a few more thoughts:

* “Show, don’t tell” has become one of those writing cliches that’s so commonplace it loses its meaning. Think of it instead as “Dramatize or describe, don’t state.” If you want your reader to know that your character is sneaky, don’t state “Dennis was the sneakiest little boy in Springfield.” Instead, dramatize a scene where he quietly steals from the Halloween stashes of all his brothers and sisters. If you want your reader to understand the grandeur of the castle your heroine is approaching, don’t state, “It was the largest structure Arzina had ever seen.” Instead, describe how many towers it has, how far the walls stretch in each direction, how tall the gates stand, the thickness and purity of the stone. I’m reading Leigh Bardugo’s marvelous Six of Crows right now, and here’s the moment where one character, Nina, first sees her imprisoned ex-lover, Matthias, in a fighting arena:

Now he looked like what he truly was:  a killer. His bare torso seemed hewn from steel, and though she knew it wasn’t possible, he seemed bigger, as if the very structure of his body had changed. His skin had been gilded honey; now it was fish-belly white beneath the grime. And his hair—he’d had such beautiful hair, thick and golden worn long in the way of Fjerdan soldiers. Now, like the other prisoners, his head had been shaved, probably to prevent lice. Whichever guard had done it had made a mess of the job. Even from this distance, she could see the cuts and nicks on his scalp, and little strips of blond stubble in the places the razor and missed. And yet, he was beautiful still. 

Can’t you see Matthias in front of you now, and feel all his pent-up strength, humiliation, and (quite possibly) consequent rage? That is damn good showing. 

* When either dramatizing or describing, remember:  You are a movie camera. That means you have a responsibility to give us everything we need to know about what’s right in front of us — Matthias’s size in the example above, the tone of his skin, the status of his hair -- because you are our only possible source for that information. But you also are the movie director, with the ability to set up a camera angle and choose the lens, and your decisions there give the facts we see feeling and meaning. Six of Crows is written in multiple limited third-person omniscient, and Nina’s memories of how Matthias used to look invest his present appearance with a tenderness, even a pathos, that another character’s point of view wouldn’t have. 

* Use all five senses. Here’s another passage later in that same scene in the arena:

At the last second, Matthias dropped into a crouch, knocking the first wolf into the dirt, then rolling right to pick up the bloodied knife the previous combatant had left in the sand. He sprang to his feet, blade held out before him, but Nina could sense his reluctance. His head was cocked to one side, and the look in his blue eyes was pleading, as if he was trying to engaged the two wolves circling him in some silent negotiation. Whatever the plea might have been, it went unheard. The wolf on the right lunged. Matthias crouched low and spun, lodging in his knife in the wolf’s belly. It gave a miserable yelp, and Matthias seemed to shudder at the sound. It cost him precious seconds. The third wolf was on him, knocking him to the sand. Its teeth sank into his shoulder. He rolled, taking the wolf with him. The wolf’s jaws snapped, and Matthias caught them. He wrenched them apart, the muscles of his arms flexing, his face grim. Nina squeezed her eyes shut. There was a sickening crack. The crowd roared. 

There aren’t scent, touch, and taste notes here, because Nina is too far away to experience those, but “bloodied knife,” “blue eyes,” “muscles of his arms flexing”:  These small visual details play up the intensity and physicality of the scene. The “miserable yelp” and “sickening crack” (note the italics) allow us to hear what the characters are hearing, to be in the scene with them. And that is really the point of all of this dramatizing and description:  To have us readers live the action in real time with the characters, so we feel like we are there.

[Note also the strong action verbs; the short, tight sentences of this fight, compared to the longer, more leisurely phrasing of the description of Matthias above; the way Ms. Bardugo only uses multiple clauses when she wants to slow a moment down (“the muscles of his arms flexing, his face grim”). Those effects match the sound of the scene to its content, which contributes to the immersiveness of the experience, and is another sign of excellent, truly next-level writing.]

* Finally, minimize and pace out your explanations — your telling — to serve your larger story ends. Throughout this passage, we see how reluctant Matthias is to fight the wolves, and Nina’s deep sympathy for him in the situation. But the cause of his reluctance is only revealed in the paragraph after the fight above, while it’s still going on:  “Wolves were sacred to his kind . . . They were friends and companions, fighting side by side with their druskelle masters.” That moment of telling deepens the showing by creating a deeper emotional subtext for the fight. And it’s not until the end of the scene that we get the kicker:  “Tears streaked the dirt on Matthias’ face. The rage was gone, and it was like some flame had gone out with it. His north sea eyes were colder than she’d ever seen them, empty of feeling, stripped of anything human at all. This was what Hellgate had done to him. And it was her fault.” 

A few chapters further into the book, I STILL don’t know how or why Nina got Matthias committed to the Hellgate. But my desire to find out, and Ms. Bardugo’s masterful showing (dramatization, description, writing) are two of the many, many reasons I’m reading on. I wish you well with your own showing and telling.