Day 197: Writing About Simple Things

There's a writing exercise I enjoy doing where I look around me for a simple object and try to make up a story about it. It usually ends up with a plain little piece of flash fiction, but it helps me keep things interesting in the parts of my story that don't really have much going on otherwise. Finding conflict and resolution in the tiniest moments can be just as difficult as orchestrating a huge scene with dozens moving parts. On top of keeping me sharp, it helps me clear up writer's block too because it always reminds me just how much there is to write about. Sometimes little objects will have a lot more story within than you'd expect. I wrote a whole 1500 words about a seed of wheat the other day, from stalk to sandwich and back again. A little silly maybe, but it's fun and useful. Here's an example:

Orange tip and white body, a bottle that cleaves things together. It glides along the paper, squeezed tightly by the hand of an artist, ready to combine the first elements of a new project. She squeezes hard, harder, until her knuckles turn as white as the substance within, but to no avail. Something is stuck fast. She plumbs the tiny opening with a needle to clear the blockage, but meets hard plastic rather than dried glue. Oh. With a twist, the entry is cleared and the project resumes, but her self confidence may never quite be the same.

This took me maybe five minutes to write and another five minutes to round out and clean up. The conflict is the glue bottle getting stuck, and the point is that sometimes the stupidest thing can get in the way of creation, like forgetting that a twistcap has to be twisted before it will work. I think of my own head as a stuck twistcap sometimes. It gets in the way of what's inside unless I do the simple things to keep the creative juices flowing. Eat food, sleep well, that kind of thing. This story was barely a story at all, but it does reveal a lot about what was on my mind while I was writing it. Thinking about some random little object around you and writing a story about it will often reveal deeper meaning than you might expect. That's really why this helps me clear up writer's block. It can tell me what I'm thinking about more clearly than if I were to directly write about how I feel. Maybe it could work for you too.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley