The number one skill I recommend for writers is capturing moments. Capturing moments makes you a better writer every single time you write one.
What’s a moment?
Here’s an example.
I am standing at Starbucks this morning waiting for my quad-shot, half-caf, one-honey, with-room Americano and I spy a little girl also waiting with her mother. Her mother is blonde with long curls spiraling past her shoulders. She is wearing a little black sundress and has a toe ring on one of her sandled feet. You might think the little girl, around age five, would be similarly girly, but nope. She is wearing a lime green jacket over a navy sundress and pink puffy Crocs. Her face reminds me of drawings I’ve seen of Ramona in the Beverly Cleary books. The mother is poised and calm. The little girl is jittery and happy. She does not walk over to the counter next to her mother, she dances in an exaggerated fashion, jutting out her arms like violin bows going both ways, making up steps to the music as she walks. Her legs are pale and so is her little square, pig-tailed face, which often glances up with a huge grin at her mother. From the side, I can’t see her mother’s face as it is wrapped in long, thick curls. The way she carries herself seems to want to keep the curls intact as long as possible. But I assume she is looking at the girl with approval, since I am grinning and on the verge of laughing out loud witnessing her childish exuberance. I glance over at woman to the left of me, who is also witnessing the girl. She is somewhere between blank and scowling, which I don’t understand, since the little girl’s joy is so contagious. I look at the solemn woman a half-second longer. Is she sure she can’t smile? Apparently, she cannot. Back to my right, the girl suddenly launches herself from her mother’s side and takes two giant strides towards the Starbucks counter, then pushes herself up on her hands like a gymnast going over the vault, while in mid-air she grabs a straw from the collection, and comes solidly back down on her feet. She pivots and marches towards her mother holding up the straw with a giant grin across her face as though she has just scored a perfect ten. But she is not a gymnast, who would be poised, cool, and collected, more like the mother. She is all spindly little-girl arms and legs, her dancing rhythms are jerky and explosive, her brown pigtails spurt out of the sides of her head like two tiny explosions. She is all girl. No TV or Internet has succeeded in subduing her with articles and videos of how to get a perfect bikini body this summer. No tense mother has shaken a finger at her over and over telling her to calm down and behave. She explodes into spontaneous dance moves and giant grins and vaults over imagined obstacles just like all girls, little and big, always should.
That’s a moment. I did not write it in response to a prompt, I wrote it about something I witnessed this morning.
You can write moments about things you witness, feel, remember, or you can write moments in response to a prompt, which is a way of asking your writer-self to wake up, engage, and respond.
You don’t have to go anywhere to write a response, you can write a response from wherever you are. And since writers are virtually everywhere in the summer time, I created a series of 30 prompts to help us have something to respond to every day.
This moment was a personal response to something concrete. Moments that you write to my series of prompts can be anything you like. I suggest you let them be what they want to be. Just let them flow out. Just be writing.
If you decide to register and join the fun, I hope you will share the badge I’ve included with this post. It’s linked to registration page for the challenge already, so feel free to pin it or share it. You may share what you write in your blog as you write, so long as you do not give away the prompt itself. If you wish, you can share the challenge badge with your posts, but it’s not required.
Some writers prefer to write in private, some in public, some in groups, etc. The key is to write however you enjoy writing most. These are writing for pleasure prompts, after all.
Happy summer writing. May you burst into spontaneous fits of imagination…just like the little girl I saw at Starbucks today.
