Greetings, writers—
When one is stuck in a rough spot, one could do worse than spend a few hours in a kindergarten classroom.
Yesterday I substituted for Ms. D, the kindergarten teacher both my children had and loved deeply. I got to school early, coffee in hand, seltzer water and potato chips (best snack combo ever, fyi) in my bag. It was the most beautiful morning—cool and sunny, the rhododendrons going wild, roses exploding everywhere, the house finches and song sparrows trilling scales like piccolos—and ahead of me were not hours of writing but hours of talking about punctuation marks, foods from different countries, and qualities we might look for in a friend.
Every year Ms. D gets a dozen chicken eggs and incubates them in the classroom, and when I walked in at eight a.m., I saw that three eggs had hatched overnight. The chicks were loud, wet, scrabbling over one another in the incubator. I carried them over to join their three peeping siblings in the big plastic tub near the reading table.
When the bell rang, the human chicks came in. They hung up their backpacks, put their blue folders in their cubbies, and sanitized their tiny hands. They remembered me and the stuffed owl I’d brought in last time, which they thought should be called Starfish or Dr. Puffers, although Dr. Poop was suggested, too.
They were sweet and earnest and full to their absolute brims with energy. Even when they were being perfectly still and quiet, it was like I could see the wild life force in them, glittering and zinging around, just beneath their skin. And this is going to sound a little hokey—sorry—but you guys, that force was love. They had so much of it, and they were flinging it everywhere. It could land on a stuffed owl or a substitute teacher or a peeping swirl of baby chickens.
And when they loved something, their impulse was to make it an offering. They made a bunch of drawings for me, and even more drawings for the chicks, and these gifts piled up on my chair and by the chicks’ bin. They were six years old, and they could not stop giving.
So, today, in honor of those small lovely people, write a scene in which your character (who, again, could always be you) is given something.
But, because story = conflict, let’s complicate this in a way a six-year-old never would.
Your character is given something that (pick one):
a.) they don’t deserve
b.) they should not have
c.) belongs to someone else
d.) is wildly inappropriate
e.) they really don’t want
f.) seems like a gift, but is really more of a curse
Happy writing—
Emily
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