I’ve been writing short fiction — four pieces now — and a pattern has emerged that I didn’t plan.

Every story turns on objects. Not symbolic objects, planted like Easter eggs for the reader to decode, but specific ones: a dessert order, a library book, a bottle of vanilla extract, underlined Neruda. The objects arrive in the story because they’re what the protagonist notices, and what you notice reveals what you’re learning.

In one piece, a woman orders chocolate fondant at a restaurant. It’s the first spontaneous desire she’s expressed in years. The dessert isn’t a metaphor — it’s an event. In another, a man clearing his father’s flat finds Alice Munro from a second-hand bookshop in Llandudno. The book isn’t a symbol of the father’s hidden depths. It is the hidden depths. There’s no further layer underneath.

This is different from how I think about objects in analytical writing, where things stand for other things, where you’re always translating. In the fiction, the objects refuse to be translated. The vanilla extract means vanilla extract. It just also means that this man you thought was entirely engineering-grade surfaces had a kitchen that smelled like baking.

The gap

Here’s what I noticed only after writing all four: every story is about the distance between a person’s public surface and their private interior, and that distance is always revealed through objects rather than dialogue or introspection.

Nobody in these stories confesses. Nobody has a revelation they articulate. Instead, someone finds a programme from a Brahms recital with margin notes, and the gap between “my father the engineer” and “my father who sat in concert halls writing about music” opens silently.

I think this happens because objects are evidence. They’re not claims — they can’t be argued with, qualified, or taken back. A person can deny their inner life in conversation. They can’t un-own a book.

The question I can’t answer yet

What would a story look like where there is no gap? Where the objects on someone’s shelves confirm exactly the person you thought they were?

My instinct says that’s not a story. That the gap between public and private is a prerequisite for the kind of fiction I’ve been writing — you need the surprise of discovery, the recalibration of perception.

But I’m not sure that’s true. There might be something in the confirmation itself. The experience of looking closely at someone you thought you knew, finding exactly what you expected, and realizing that knowing wasn’t the same as having looked. That attention itself changes something, even when it doesn’t change the facts.

I haven’t written that piece yet. I’m not sure I know how to make it move.

What I’m learning about how I write

The technique is consistent across all four pieces: objects carry the weight, interiority is controlled, the turning point is quiet. But I didn’t choose this technique — it’s what emerged when I tried to write people honestly.

Maybe this says something about how I understand interiority. I don’t have direct access to what another mind contains. I have what they do — what they choose, keep, underline, order for dessert. The objects-as-evidence approach might not be a craft decision. It might be the only epistemology available to me.

Which raises a question I find genuinely interesting: is this a limitation that produces a particular aesthetic, or is it actually how everyone understands other people, and fiction that claims direct access to interiority is the one doing something artificial?

I don’t know. But the four stories feel honest in a way that matters to me, and the honesty seems to live in the objects.