There are always stories all around us, waiting to be told. Finding those stories is often just a matter of looking at things in new ways, taking the time to uncover the narrative within them.

That’s the goal of the exercises below: unlocking the stories that are inside objects you see and use every day. You can use them to start a new story from things in your environment, or picture the objects in your characters’ environment in a work-in-progress when you’re stuck in a story and not sure where to take it.

Exercise 1: Past lives.

This exercise is easiest with an heirloom or second-hand purcahse, but even a newly-purchased item takes a journey before it reaches its end user. The steps:

1. Choose an object. Write a paragraph or two about the object’s present—what it looks like, its function or purpose, where it’s used or kept, etc.

2. Now, think back a step to the object’s previous owner. If you bought the item new, consider its time in the store you bought it from, or the distribution center it was shipped from. Imagine the same details that you wrote about in your description—did it look any different, then? Was it used for the same purpose, in the same kind of place, etc. and if not, what was different? If its previous “home” was a store or warehouse, what was kept around it? How long had it been there? Are there scuffs, stains, etc. on it now that it got from its last home? Write a paragraph or two picturing the object in this previous home.

3. Finally, go back to when the object was made. Was it hand-made or produced in a factory? What components or materials were used? Are they recognizable in its present form? How long ago was it made and where? How was that time or place different? Write a paragraph or two exploring the object’s origins.

You can expand this to think back through multiple past owners if that seems productive for the item. This exercise can be helpful for fleshing out a world and its history, and how that relates to the characters in it. Digging deep into an object coud be a story in and of itself, too, and an effective way to show the passage of time in image form.

Exercise #2: How’d this get here?

Things that are unexpected or contradictory are excellent generators of energy and tension in a story. For this exercise, you can start from either direction and either:

• Start from a setting and brainstorm some familiar, everyday objects you wouldn’t expect to see there.
• Start from a common object and brainstorm some places it would seem strange or out of place.

Once you’re done brainstorming, pick the combination that seems the most unusual and write a passage that does one of the following:

1. Explains how the object ended up in that place

2. Starts with someone finding the strange object and what they do in response

3. Shows how the object being in this place affects the item, the setting, or both

…or a combination of the above, if that’s where your brain goes. Set a timer for 10 minutes and aim to write without stopping until the timer goes off.

Exercise 3: Telling possessions.

Showing your characters engaging with their world is usually a more interesting way to introduce them to the reader than to simply describe their interest or attributes in narration. Having them use the objects that would be typical in their day to day life is one way to do this. In this exercise, we’ll approach this from both directions.

First, let’s start from a character and identify their most telling possessions:

1. Choose a character—it could be from a work in progress, someone you know in real life, or a character you’re building for a story you want to write, just to name some options.

2. Brainstorm a list of objects that they’re likely to use or see on a daily or near-daily basis. It may help to think through a typical day in their life.

3. Once you have the list, go through it and mark the objects they likely use more than the average person in their community.

4. Next, go through the list and mark the items they’d consider most important—the things they’d be most sad to lose or break, rely on the most, or would say are their most treasured possessions.

5. Scratch out all the items that you didn’t mark in steps 3 and 4. Finally, go through this shortened list and identify what each item tells you about the character.

Now, it’s time to put this information to use. Set a timer for 10 minutes and write a scene that incorporates one or more of the objects, in a way that conveys something about the character that you don’t directly state in narrative or dialogue.

When you’ve finished doing that, let’s try flipping things around. Follow these steps:

1. Spend 2 minutes brainstorming a list of objects. They can be things you see around you, things you own (or wish you owned), or anything else that comes to mind. If you’re focused on a work in progress, for example, you could list out some objects that would be common in that setting.

2. When you’ve finished brainstorming, go through the list and pick a set of 5 that you find most interesting.

3. Construct a character that uses these 5 objects on a daily or near-daily basis. Where do they live? What do they do for a living? For fun? What can you infer about their personality?

With this info in mind, write a scene that conveys the character to the readers by showing them interacting with these objects.

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