Cheers to another Tuesday Chooseday! Is it a comfort-zone kind of week, or will you try something different? 

This Tuesday, let’s play with time.

Think about time in writing—sometimes it moves very quickly indeed, covering days or years in only a few hundred words. Sometimes it’s like molasses, pages and pages, hundreds of pages even, for just a single day. Sometimes time is linear, marching always on. But sometimes in writing, we twist time until it flows backward, or in two directions at once, or suspends itself.

A Single Moment

Today’s challenge is to write about a single moment. How much surrounding this moment is up to you, as long as the action of your writing is limited to this moment. Ernest Hemingway’s Hills Like White Elephants, for instance, gives us rather a lot surrounding the moment of this conversation. So much, so that I might consider it more than one moment.

If Hills Like White Elephants were your response to the exercise, I would tell you to focus in on just the awkwardness of the first part of the conversation, before he brings up the operation, or just the conversation about the operation, or just when we walks inside, or moves the bags, or the look they share at the end.

How specific can you get? How minute? How long can you suspend a single moment—how long can you stop time?