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Let's talk about objects and how they can enhance your writing! Creating objects can help bring your characters off the page and help to create stories for them.

• a family heirloom

• photos of family, friends, holidays, festivals, and vacations

• posters and or other images hanging on your walls

• special clothes for special occasions

• books

• ornaments

• everyday useful things like mugs or silverware

Every item has a history-including that plastic fork you have yet to throw out. They help paint a story of their surroundings. Wherever you can create an object in your writing, you build the world out a little more.

• as a plot device: sometimes the plot can revolve around finding or destroying an object (see Lord of the Rings)

• to represent a character: sometimes, personal items say more about the character than the character's actions. Think of the wands in Harry Potter and how crooked Bellatrix's is.

• as a symbol representing something larger than itself: for this the most famous example I could think of is the green light in The Great Gatsby, and how it represents Gatsby's hopes, dreams, and his connection to Daisy.

• as a clue: maybe you're writing a mystery or detective fiction. Objects can be used to reveal all sorts of significant things. Channel your inner Sherlock and consider how people use objects every day to really drive this home.

• to foreshadow something: sometimes a gun hanging on the wall will come up later.

• to trigger a memory or flashback: sometimes things just look too familiar and they spark something within us.

• as a device connecting characters' separate stories: maybe your object, magical or otherwise, has been around for significant moments in history, sitting in the corner and lifelessly observing things as life happens around it.

Objects are useful because characters can find them, lose them, receive them, gift them, steal or have them stolen, search for them, treasure them, neglect them, lock them up, and even destroy them or toss them aside. And the symbolism of their actions can add to your story.

Pick an object in your home that has some meaning for you. Study it for a moment and describe it in as much detail as you can.

Now construct a scene around it.

Was the object stolen or found?

Was it a gift?

Was it inherited?

Make sure the object triggers a significant event for your character (or you, if you're writing about yourself). Let the object help them make a decision, understand something that happened, or turn their life in a different direction.

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Intuitive logic: fairy tales don't conform to the rules of our world, but it does have rules. They will not be explained by insistence. Furniture will sing and dance. Paths will appear when you need them. Children can outsmart ancient witches. Disarticulated limbs will turn silver and you can sell them to save yourself later. Resist the urge to explain the logic and let your readers just accept what's happening. Remove transitions like "therefore" and "because."

Flatness: In fairy tales, characters aren't deep, psychologically anyway. Snow White doesn't have depression or PTSD after getting hunted by her stepmother, Belle doesn't have a psychotic break after the candelabra and clock talks to her, and little red riding hood doesn't have a panic disorder after finding her grandmother had been eaten by a wolf. But they all had reactions. Now, there's nothing wrong with adding psychological depth to fairy tales (in fact, this is beneficial if you're going for a longer piece). But flat characters leave space to exceed limitations surrounding individuality, uniqueness, and self.

Happy endings: J.R.R Tolkien once defended happy endings as a vital technique in literature, because joy can be as poignant as grief. Creating poetic joy in your prose is okay. A lot of fairy tales end with dark, terrible lessons, but you can let the sunset on a girl in a white dress smiling at the tide. Happy endings aren't bad.

Fairy tales are some of the first stories we read and often the first kind we attempt to write.

Then look at your own new stories and look for examples of explained logic, character depth, and tragedy. Remove efforts to explain logic, tighten character depth, but do not remove the tragedy. Instead, quickly add a unique and strangely blissful image afterward, your own Grimm gesture to emote through your setting.

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Map out a set of characters for your piece so you can play with who your characters will meet, love, hate, rescue, or fight.

1. Write the full name of your main character in the middle of the page. Add in any nicknames or pet names they have.

2. Insert all the people in the main character's life around the name in the center and connect them to the protagonist with bold lines. Include names and details for family, friends, work colleagues, neighbors, lovers, and such.

3. Add people who the main character doesn't know but who might play a part in the story. Don't connect them to the main character just yet. Just come up with a supporting cast.

4. Draw connections between the other characters but leave your main character out of it for now. Try color-coding them so you know which connections your main character knows and which they are in the dark about.

5. Identify potential enemies among the characters in these groups. Underline the characters with potential for evil in a different color so you can find them easily.

As you begin to define the relationship your main character has to the rest of the cast, consider writing it down along the lines you've drawn. As the map develops, you may begin to get a much more complete and complex picture of your main character.