Tag: 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”:

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