Six Words for the Moment

If you could only use six words to describe your current moment, what would those be?

This is, in essence what we do every time we add a new sentence to our works. Every moment, the sequential stream of events we call life, is boiled down and recorded one string of words at a time. There is so much going on around us, and also by nature the worlds our characters live in, it almost seems impossible to pick so few words. But we must, we can't communicate everything because I could fill a volume with just the details of one moment in time.

So we must choose our words, the ones we will use to record that moment in time, carefully.

But how do you do it? In a way, it is like using a pinhole camera to take in a grand vista of which you can see for hundreds of miles around. You only get a few words before the reader's mind leave you, and moves on to that next action, that next line of dialog, or that next bit of information you choose to share about the scene. There are so many words, we could spend paragraphs talking about the sweep of the land, how the fields below look like tiny squares of bread, how the clouds rest gently on the plains, and the smell of the air, the thin cool air, and on and on. It's impossible to take it all in, yet you must.

You need to communicate the essence of the scene in as few words as possible, because you have a book to get on with. You have love lives to explore, traumas to overcome, tragedies to inflict, revelations to deliver, and every thing else a writer does. We are the god in this world, and we cannot linger. Our entire world needs attention, in the past, the present, and the future. We cannot stay in this moment for long.

Yet for some moments, we want to spend just a little longer. If this vista is so grand, we may decide to spend a moment to look, to see, and to live in this moment before the march of time moves on. We will give ourselves a few more words here, and we will let ourselves wander here for a moment. These moments are rare and precious, as the writer can't paint a grand vista in every scene, and we need to keep the tick-tock of the clock moving on to our book's eventual end.

But how do you pick the words if you have so few?

It's like asking, which way do you go if you are on a long journey?

Well, for that second question, the answer is easy, you go the shortest route. There are some exceptions for easier routes that are a little longer, but we tend to be moving towards our destination along the path of least resistance. This is how you travel, and it is should be how you write. Now, on a long trip you need to be patient too, you can't expect to get to where you want to go in a couple heartbeats, so you pace yourself, be patient, and take in the sights along the way.

So those words you pick should be like the ones you remember from that long trip. Maybe there was this glorious sunset on the road, or some eccentric retired couple in a RV from Canada at the last gas station you can't get out of your head. Maybe it's a pair of ravens sitting on a road sign watching a smeared spot of road kill. Maybe it's the looming clouds of a storm and flashes of thunder that never came. Maybe it's the face of a mountain that looked like an actual face for just a moment, and the next time you looked it was gone. You know these moments by heart, they speak to you, and they stick in your mind like photographs that will only be gone to the world when you pass onto the next.

So you pick the best, and the best isn't always the most Norman Rockwell or Thomas Kinkade, they are the ones that stick with you. These are the words, and these will be the six of which you will choose. You will make them the best, and not linger so long the reader tires or says 'I get it already' you will give them just enough to get a taste, but not pile up on the plate. We want to keep the reader hungry, always wanting more, and not getting so bogged down with the moment they are full and want to go to sleep.

Writers eat light meals and serve small portions. We experience every taste. We sample a hundred small dishes and sit there for a moment with each, wondering how we could put each taste into words. Maybe we even pull out a notebook after a particularly interesting taste, and we write our thoughts down. We sample life. We wonder how alone that one speck of dust is sitting on the back of our laptop in that sea of black. We notice. We record. We understand measure and metronome. We understand the economy of words.

Picking six seems much easier now.