Verbal Snapshots #2
Friday, May 3, 2013 at 3:03PM 
If a picture is worth a thousand words, what kind of picture can I paint in 140 characters or less? (What are Verbal Snapshots? See below.)
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Wind at Work: A red-and-white-striped patio umbrella on its side at the bottom of a grassy hillside.
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White petal confetti on wet spring green grass.
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Oreo cow.
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Two fuzzy brown ducklings on a green slope littered with stale bread.
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A white plastic bag floats, like a ghostly balloon, in the wind above a cemetery.
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3 llamas in a field: One chocolate brown. One vanilla white. And one choco-caramel-swirl w/ an ebony head & white eyebrows.
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Tiny parade route: Dozens of flags festoon neighborhood lawns, marking utility lines in red, blue, green, orange, yellow, white.
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Man & woman in full hiking gear, including huge backpacks & trekking poles, stroll along a street in a suburban subdivision.
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The In-between Season: A robin hops among chunks of snow twice his height.
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What are Verbal Snapshots?
Sometimes there's no time to snap a picture. Sometimes the scope of what you want to capture is too big, too small, or too fleeting for any camera. I wrote my first Verbal Snapshot on Twitter a year ago when I saw an elderly man in a suit riding a red and silver bicycle. I didn't get a photo of him, but I wanted to capture the image, so I described it and called it a Verbal Snapshot.
Verbal Snapshots are the word equivalents of Instagram and all those photo we take with our phones on the go. Recently I've made a practice of describing the moments in time that catch my eye, my heart, or my fancy. Language is how I make sense of the world, and so much of what I write blooms from simple moments of beauty, joy, wonder, or oddity. These little "Language-grams" are my reminders to pay attention to the world around me and to look for the stories waiting to be told.
Follow me on Twitter or Facebook to see these snippets as I publish them, or come back here to the blog where I'll collect the newest together every few weeks. (See other posts in this series.)
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