3. Pocket Tales
Not killing time, but spending it.
Dear Reader,
Time is fundamental to life, yet so easily wasted. I don’t like the phrase ‘killing time’ – I don’t kill time when I’m running early for an appointment, or have a spare five minutes before a work meeting – I spend it!
I don’t often have hours or days at a time to spend writing, but at the beach yesterday on a brief break away from my day-to-day life I had a five-minute walk and then wrote just fifty words about it. It was such a fun exercise. Tailoring my ‘pocket tale’ to exactly fifty words was a challenge, with the big decisions I made about the words to leave in being matched by the equally big decisions about which to leave out!
She could have walked for hours to find her hoard. No sea glass today: instead, a rusty square washer, a smooth pebble of white quartz and a crescent of sparkling, seaworn oyster shell. Just three tiny pocket treasures collected in a single five-minute stroll. That’s all the time she’d needed.
Reader, when I find I don’t have time to spare to write, I’ll make it my aim to find just five minutes to spend on it. I’m not going to kill snatches of time here and there, leaving it empty, unused and wasted as I wait for appointments or a lunch date: instead, I’ll try spend just five minutes exploring my surroundings and write exactly fifty words relating to that precious time. I’ll keep those little stories in my (metaphorical) pocket with thoughts, memories and of course any tiny treasures I’ve picked up along the way.
Thank you for not killing time, and for spending some of yours reading this! I know how precious it is.
Keep well.
Love,
Rebecca
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What fifty words are in your pocket today? How did they get there?
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Me too! I have a couple of them. We are in good company.
Brilliant 50 words, Rebecca. Vivid images. Try more fiction. You have it in you.