Wedding Small Stones

What is a small stone?
A small stone is a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully-engaged moment. There are no strict rules for what makes a piece of writing a small stone, as there are for forms such as haiku. The process of finding small stones is as important as the finished product – searching for them will encourage you to keep your eyes (and ears, nose, mouth, fingers, feelings and mind) open.
I have been writing a daily small stone at a small stone since 2005 and collecting other people’s stones at a handful of stones since 2008. In 2011 Kaspa & I launched the river of stones.

Where will I find small stones? Small stones are everywhere, all of the time. All you have to do is pause and let them appear. You’ll know when you see one, because it will set off a small burst of feeling inside you. It might be that you really notice the ugliness of a piece of chewed gum on the pavement, or the beauty of a pigeon, or vice versa. An overheard snippet of conversation might strike you as amusing, or strange. Whatever you notice, you will be noticing it with fresh eyes.

How do I pick up my small stones? The best way is to catch them as they occur, by carrying a note-book around with you and jotting down some notes straight away. If you don’t have any paper, the back of your hand will do. If you don’t have a pen, play around with some words in your head and hold onto them until you can catch them on paper. You might want to write a lot down to start with - let your imagination off the leash. When you’ve written down everything you can think of, you can go through what you’ve got and choose the words that seem to get you close to what you originally noticed. There - a small stone!

How do I polish up my stones?
The following check-list will help you to polish your stone up until it is as perfect as you can make it:

Have you used precise words? Was the berry red or was it scarlet?
Is every single word necessary? In a short piece of writing, every word must earn its keep. If it doesn’t add anything, take it out!
Have you shown us something or told us something? It is usually more effective to describe something and let the reader draw their own conclusions, than to ‘spell it out’. Rather than writing ‘the sky was beautiful’, show us the sky.
How does it look on the page? Do you want to use a title? How do you want to use capital letters and punctuation? Do you want to break up your sentence into shorter pieces and put them underneath each other? Fiddle about until it looks right.
What does it sound like when you read it out loud? Does the rhythm please you? Do you stumble at the same point every time? How do the words sound next to each other? Fiddle about until it sounds right.

There are no right or wrong answers to any of these questions – part of being a writer is discovering your own unique ‘way with words’. The important thing is that you take time to consider them, and do some tinkering. This tinkering should be fun – be playful.

What do I do with my small stones?
Submit your wedding small stone to us here.
If you get bitten by the small stone bug (and we hope you do), then you might want to join in our July daily challenge, where people from all over the world will be noticing something every day and writing it down.
Find out more about the project here. You might just want to keep your small stones in a notebook, or send them to your friends, or post them at the Writing Our Way Home forum. Or you might want to submit them to my blogzine, ‘a handful of stones’, which publishes a small stone every day. Look outside your window right now. What can you see?