What Do You Take? What Do You Leave Behind?

I'm still away on the writing trip, readers, but I thought I'd post a quick writing exercise to keep you eager for more here at Writerly Life. As the girls around me pick and choose what souvenirs to take home from their trip, I'm beginning to wonder what goes into a choice like that in general. How do we decide that one object is worth saving, while another will only add to the growing clutter in our lives? I sometimes think of myself as a cluttered minimalist; I deeply admire the ethic of minimalism and always dream of having a living space that is stripped down. But at the same time, I can't help valuing some bits of clutter in my life, and I cling to some objects, filling them with sentimental value. Memory is important to me, and memory often requires triggers, concrete things we can look at and hold in order to conjure up that image of the day at the beach or the trip to the big city.

So today, try to turn this question onto yourself, and turn it onto your fictional characters. What do you leave behind? How do you choose? What makes an object live for you or your character? Does he or she value concrete memory triggers like souvenirs (meaning "to remember" in French)? If your character had to leave everything but a few objects behind, what would he or she choose to take and why? It reveals a tremendous amount about a character to see what he would take in a fire or how much he wants to get rid of during a vigorous spring cleaning. Some people cling to their clutter with surprising desperation. They begin to link the memory with the object until they are convinced the memory will no longer exist if they lose the object. Keeping that souvenir, they think, is the only way to preserve events in time, to keep them alive.

And there are other people who have absolutely no sentimentality about objects, who find it all part of the trash heap of the world, all useless. This extremely practical approach can be taken to as neurotic an extreme as hoarding. Today, try thinking about what side of the spectrum you and your character veer towards.

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