Snapshots, Thoughtshots and Explode the Moment: Strategies for

adding life to your writing. Thanks to Barry Lane, After the End.
"Snapshots" -- Looking through the photo lens of a magic camera that can see,
hear, feel, touch, smell in order to capture the sensory details of a scene.
Ma put he kids to bed and did some sewing till they fell asleep.
vs
Ma kissed them both, and tucked the covers in around them. The lay there awhile,
looking at Ma's smooth, parted hair and her hands busy with sewing in the lamplight.
Her needle made little clicking sounds against her thimble and then the thread went
softly, swish! Through the pretty calico that Pa had traded furs for.
-Ingalls Wilder
Little House in the Big Woods
The baker listened to the woman.
vs
The baker, who was an older man with a thick neck, listened without saying anything
when she told him the child would be eight next Monday. The Baker wore a white
apron that looked like a smock. Straps cut under his arms, went around back and then
to front again where they were secure under his heavy waist. He wiped his hands on his
apron as he listened to her. He kept his eyes down on the photographs and let her talk.
He let her take her time. He'd just come to work and he'd be there all night, baking, and
he was in no real hurry.
-Raymond Carver
A Small Good Thing
Thoughtshots - A writer's ability to communicate what a character is thinking and feeling at
a given moment. Often uses interior or actual dialogue as well as narration. Thoughtshots:
draw frames around stories and essays
place events in a context and give the reader and the writer a reason to be interested
Thoughtshots are another way to include detail in your writing. A thoughtshot allows the writer
to pause and reflect on a particular event or a detail. For example, you could write My mother
always sat down in front of the television after dinner. But a thoughtshot would be far more
interesting to read. Here is an example:
I dont know why my mother always sat down in front of the television after dinner.
Perhaps it was the only time she really had for herself. My sister and I always
had to do the dishes. My step-father usually went out to the garage to work on
the old Buick that he always thought he could get up and running someday.
Maybe Mom just liked being alone with her game show. She always watched
Jeopardy with Alex Trebeck. I think she thought Alex was handsome and smart.
Maybe she dreamed that Alex would come into our living room one day and swoop
her off to game show land. Mom knew a lot of the answers on Jeopardy, and shed
call them out to the television as if those contestants could hear her. Where is China!
shed yell. I always thought it was sort of dumb, and I remember one time my best friend
Angela was over at my house. She heard my mother and looked at me like I was weird.
A thoughtshot lets you go deeper into your own mind, and it allows you to go deeper into the
mind of someone you are writing about. A famous writer named Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. said that
When we read we meditate with other minds. A thoughtshot lets you do that as a writer, and
sets things up so your reader can do that, too.
Heres an example of a thoughtshot from Hatchet by Gary Paulsen.
The jolts that took the pilot had come, and now Brian sat and there was a strange feeling of
silence in the thrumming roar of the enginea strange feeling of silence and being alone.
He was stopped. Inside he was stopped. He could not think past what he saw, what he felt. All
was stopped. The very core him, the very center of Brian Robeson was stopped and stricken
with a white-flash of horror, a terror so intense that his
breathing, his thinking, and nearly his heart had stopped.
Seconds passed, seconds that became all of his life, and he began to know what he was
seeing, began to understand what he saw and that was worse, so much worse that he wanted
to make his mind freeze again.
He was sitting in a bushplane roaring seven thousand feet above the northern wilderness with a
pilot who had suffered a massive heart attack and who was either dead or in something close
to a coma.
He was alone.
In a roaring plane with no pilot he was alone.
Baby Steps or Exploding a Moment
Baby steps are used to describe and action step by stepor baby step by baby step.
This is often used at a particularly dramatic or colorful part of the narrative.
For example, you could write He walked through the doorway. Or you could use
He grasped the cold doorknob and turned it slowly to the right.
He pushed the door inward. The hinges squeaked and cold air
rushed past the opening door. The room was dark. He darted
his eyes to the right. Nothing. He pushed the door open a little
farther, and slowly moved his right foot into the room. His shoe
creaked a bit as it hit the polished hardwood floor.
baby steps and write:
Babysteps give the reader meaningful details. Another way of thinking about baby
steps is called Exploding the Moment. Its when a moment is slowed way downlike
in the movies. The following is an example of an exploded moment written by a 5th
grader.
It was 4:00 a.m. of a cold Saturday morning in January. We were
going to see my cousin take off to Massachusetts and then to Saudi
Arabia. We were at the air base in Burlington, VT. When my mom
got in the door she started to cry. I could feel the urge to cry but I
held it in. All my relatives were there. Finally we went into the big
cold room where we would see them go. Everyone was crying but I
held it in. I felt like a walking teddy bear because I would walk over
to someone and they would give me a hug, then to another person
and the same thing would happen. It was now 6:30 and I was now
the official helmet holdernot for very long because that thing
weighed a ton. We had brought flags. One for my cousin Todd
and one for us to wave at him. When it was finally time to go we all
went outside and waved as they drove in their big, big truck. I felt
my heart drop and get heavy when they went away and I
remember this like it was yesterday.
Another example of creating an exploded moment occurs in the following story by
Bailey White. She might have written: We helped Cousin Ambrose try to find Uncle
Jimbuddys missing body part for what seemed like hours. Or you could use baby steps
Bailey White uses in Mama Makes Up Her Mind, and write:
When we got there, though; Uncle Jimbuddy was nowhere to be seen. We could hear
crashing and scrambling in the back. It was Jimbuddys son, Ambrose. He was
covered with sawdust, and his eyes peered out as us frantically through a cherry and
walnut haze.
Daddy cut his finger off, Ambrose said. if I can find it within__he looked at his
watchten minutes now, and get it to the hospital in that bucket of ice, they can sew
it back on.
We helped him search. With a beautiful gesture, Ambrose described the arc he
recalled the finger taking from the table saw through the air to--where? No one saw it
land.
Uncle Jimbuddy does not keep a neat workshop. The bare light bulbs hanging
from their wires are dimmed by layers of sawdust, and in the gloom we pawed through
piles of scrap lumber, moldings, floppy sheets of veneer, and miscellaneous Queen
Anne legs and Chippendale ball-and-claw feet salvaged from wrecked furniture. My
mother delicately and systematically poked and shifted things with the tip of her
walking stick. Ambrose wildly hurled debris and toppled stacks of lumber. I even turned
on the table saw, cut off the tip of a piece of molding, and traced its passage through
the air to its landing place. Nothing. The minutes ticked by and the ice began to melt.
After thirty minutes we stood up. We looked at each other and shook our heads.
Ambrose drove off disconsolately to the hospital. (pp 96-97)
Exploding the moment give the reader meaningful details, composed of well-crafted
snapshots and thoughtshots. Think of the times in movies when the action goes into
slow motionthis is similar exploding a moment in writing and reserved for important,
dramatic turning point kind of moments where stretching out the action increases the
readers tension and engagement with the action.

It was 4:00 a.m. of a cold Saturday morning in January. We were
going to see my cousin take off to Massachusetts and then to Saudi
Arabia. We were at the air base in Burlington, VT. When my mom
got in the door she started to cry. I could feel the urge to cry but I
held it in. All my relatives were there. Finally we went into the big
cold room where we would see them go. Everyone was crying but I
held it in. I felt like a walking teddy bear because I would walk over
to someone and they would give me a hug, then to another person
and the same thing would happen. It was now 6:30 and I was now
the official helmet holdernot for very long because that thing
weighed a ton. We had brought flags. One for my cousin Todd
and one for us to wave at him. When it was finally time to go we all
went outside and waved as they drove in their big, big truck. I felt
my heart drop and get heavy when they went away and I
remember this like it was yesterday.