Novella-in-Flash Writing Prompt #20 – Finding Resonance in Objects and Belongings

Here’s a wonderful, award-winning story from Sara Hills in which a character is partly understood by the belongings encountered in their room:

https://www.smokelong.com/stories/hey-lisa-i-hope-you-like/

Notice how Hills describes the narrator discovering new things about the character, through the objects she encounters in his room. The narrator feels she ought to have known these things already, and her sense of the other person is therefore destabilised. Notice too, how before the microfiction reaches its end-point, the narrator starts envisioning the other person within the context of the objects in the room, and then how the real-world situation suddenly changes for the narrator, in a surprising shift of the action. Also note how the key physical object of the mixtape in the story is naturally imbued with an emotion that has parallel relevance for the wider story context, as a mixtape is associated with nostalgia, obsolescence (of a technological kind), and relationship (since mixtapes are often given as gifts), and so the emotions inherent in the object have resonance for the overall themes of a story about loss.

Invitation: Pick one of the following writing prompts and create a new scene/story, or (if you prefer) try sketching out some “notes-towards-a-story”:

• Conjure up a character’s life and personality by describing the contents of a room that’s important to this character (you can think creatively about what kind of room and where!). OPTIONAL: consider whether the character likes or dislikes the room, and their degree of responsibility for the contents and condition of the room. Does the room contain a crucial object that’s hard to ignore? (And if you’re writing a longer fiction, might this scene uncover something the reader hasn’t already known about the character, or develop a previous thread about them?)
  
  OR
  
• Use either of the two Unsplash photographs in this blogpost to develop a story. Let the objects in either setting reveal crucial things about a person associated with that place. OPTIONAL: perhaps a secret is gradually revealed, one that changes how we feel about the person or the place.
  
  OR
  
• Focus in upon a particular object (or if you prefer, a group of objects) belonging to a character, and use the following prompts to develop a story:
  
  – Your main character is holding/touching this object, interacting with it, or looking at it. The object illuminates something important about your protagonist’s personality or life. It should be an object your character is very interested in, or fond of, or proud of, or strongly dislikes.
  
  – Go close up and describe the object’s shapes and colours.
  – Textures – how does it feel when touched?
  – Does the object (or group of objects) have a smell, a sound, a taste – describe anything else relevant to the senses.
  – Where is the object / group of objects? Describe its physical context
  – Describe your character thinking about or interacting with the object. How does it make them feel, why does this object matter to them?
  – What does the object reveal about their personality?
  
  – Finally, what does the character realise (as they think about/interact with the object) – perhaps something about themselves, or their relationships, or their status in/relationship to the world?

Above all, “make it new”!

Are you working on a novella-in-flash? Or wanting to write one? Find out more about Michael Loveday’s Novella-in-Flash mentoring: https://novella-in-flash.com/about-the-course/

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