Writing with Objects and the Everyday

I want to be able to write in a way which brings together big questions, abstract ideas, politics, and the ordinary experiences of everyday life. Something I try to do for my reader is to give them new ways to look at the familiar. This is what I think good writing should do, whether fiction or non-fiction; it should be almost unsettling. The best books alter the way one goes about one’s life sometimes in very small ways, but it is these little shifts in perception which open up new ways of thinking and relating to other people and our environment. This is quite a lofty ambition, and the challenge of bringing together the very big and the very small is something that I think about a lot in my writing. How do you tell a story that allows you to shift between the particular and the universal? 

In my work so far, as both a writer and an academic, I have found that objects often create opportunities to bring political and theoretical ideas into a mode of expression at once familiar and revelatory. It can also be a valuable way to approach structuring your writing. Rather than framing a book as a treatise on the environmental crisis, why not write about radiators and boilers? Start from the things that we share the most intimate and familiar relationships with and expand out from there.

In Living Rooms I wanted to write about the housing crisis, capitalism, property, empire, dreams. A rather ungainly set of topics which, at least for me, I don’t think I could have managed as a grand survey. Instead I structured the book around the home, a place where a vast amount of life is lived in, and yet is rarely treated with a critical eye. 

The other thing about objects is that they can help you make surprising leaps, and trace narratives that allow you to take your reader across great distances in a few pages. One of my favourite instances of this in Living Rooms involves the grey sofa that was once in the living room of Mrs Hinch. I learned that it was a DFS sofa and its grey colour was called Loch Leven, a Scottish loch where Mary Queen of Scots briefly lived in exile. By following objects and the connections that link them to places and people in your writing, you can open up new vistas of thought. 

4 things to think about when writing with objects: 

1. Follow the object
Through cultural, economic, and social connections, everyday objects are tied into a vast web. A pair of Laura Ashley curtains may not immediately take you to the British Empire but through careful research and a willingness to take the occasional leap of faith, pursuing the route that an object took to get to you, you can open up engrossing narratives and new ideas. 

2. Description as a methodology 
It is easy to try to go straight to the meaning of an object, to try to work with it as a metaphor or analogy before you understand what it actually is. Don’t forget to start by describing it on its own terms, and describing how you perceive and feel about it. By taking care to observe and describe something first before you start to use it for your own purposes, you can find new avenues of inquiry. 

3. Look for similar objects elsewhere in culture
Popular culture is full of important objects. Sometimes they can give you another insight or way of looking at what you are writing about which can be both intriguing for the reader and productive for your writing. For instance when I was writing about pot plants I found songs, films, and novels which featured pot plants in crucial moments; this really helped deepen the discussion in that chapter. 

4. Play
Objects help me to have fun with my writing. The opportunities to try out new things, in terms of both style and content, provided by really dwelling in the minutiae of my subject matter, is central to the way I think and write. Writing about picture frames meant I could hold together a discussion about the phrase ‘live laugh love’ in the same chapter as a reading of Agnes Varda’s film Daguerrotypes. It is through this kind of juxtaposition that I think some of the most enjoyable bits of writing can emerge for both the writer and the reader. 
 

Sam Johnson-Schlee is an academic and writer living by the sea in North Essex. He writes non-fiction and memoir about the politics and culture of everyday life. He is interested in how paying attention to familiar objects and practices can open up new perspectives on the world we live in. His first book, Living Rooms, was published by Peninsula Press in November 2022, and is about the domestic interior, what it feels like to live inside a commodity, and how we dream of something better from within the home. He has a newsletter called Sifting & Sorting.