Objects in fiction live in your mind, your characters’ minds, and the readers’ minds.

Writing is different from film. In film, the camera can introduce you to all the objects of the physical world of the stage, even allow you to draw connections not otherwise explicitly stated (e.g., Rosebud, in Citizen Kane). Any important object of interest, like that childhood sled at the end of the film, can hide within a welter of other discards, since it doesn’t cost any more of the viewer’s attention to see a pile of objects than just one, and to murmur “ah-ha!” as that one goes by, into the fire and oblivion.

But in writing, where you have to itemize everything the reader sees, such a wholesale display waving a revelatory clue to explain the hero’s character is much too clumsy. So, what’s a writer to do?

If your plot has an important physical clue™ to introduce, you can’t just dangle it in front of someone’s face in a written description – too obvious. So there’s always a temptation to bury it in a list of other items and hope the reader doesn’t notice, to heighten the suspense while still playing fair. This is a conventional issue for mysteries of all sorts, where you’re in the business of constructing puzzles that have to be (in principle) solvable by the reader.

But I don’t write mysteries. I write SFF, which I think of as a branch of Adventure stories. Sure, there might be a mystery in some particular plot, but that’s not the focus, and it’s not the genre I deal with. I think of objects as something else. At their foundation, they are part of the world I build, not stage dressing or plot clues, but things that interact with characters, almost little genii in their own right. They accrue character relationships over time and come to have a presence of their own.

What sorts of objects? Some examples from my current series:

• The tower clock of the old Guild Hall which the young hero saves and repairs, whose periodic chime reminds him of his success.
• The worn bit of inlay on a door that dozens have touched for luck before.
• The paperweight on the hero’s desk that he always uses to hold down the stacks of work he’s isn’t willing to look at yet, with its accusing eye.
• The fragment of a rock that he successfully broke the first time he tried to use a newly discovered magical arcana.
• The colorful rug next to his bed in the colors that come from his childhood home upstream.
• The collar on his dog that he didn’t receive until after the girl who sent it had died.

All of these things end up with lives of their own, at least in someone’s mind. Some are important to the characters – reminders of past pleasures and sorrows, stand-ins for guilty avoidance, prompts for actions yet to come, simple curiosities for them to muse on. We have objects like that of our own, and so we sympathize.

Some of these objects mean different things to different characters and that complexity can deepen the interactions between the characters and our understandings of them.

Not all objects like this are separate from the flesh. There are other things that witness time-passed and struggles: lingering injuries, the scar that is seen, the joint that is rubbed. All of these are meaningful to the characters and thus the readers.

These objects exist in the world, not just in the minds of the characters. We spend our lives assigning sentience to inanimate objects — it’s built into us, despite our recognition of that misattribution. We can’t help but be reminded, when we notice objects like these, of our history in that world (directly or as readers). The keepsakes on your own desk have such a life.

So, don’t think of objects as miscellaneous stage dressing or as pieces of an instrumental puzzle. Think of them as characters with a meaningful life of their own, with the power to illuminate the lives of others (your characters, your readers, or even Citizen Kane). Populate your written world with the sorts of things you populate your real world with — it’s part of being human.

Got any favorite fictional objects of your own?