Six Novelists, Six Odd Objects: The Little Things That Kick-Started a Book

Every book has an origin story, and roughly nine times out of ten the author will tell you it began with a theme, a character, or a deeply felt moral position. This is usually a lie of convenience. Ask a writer what was actually on the desk when the first sentence arrived and you tend to get something far stranger: a ticket stub, a broken thing, a bit of inherited tat nobody could bring themselves to bin.

So we asked six UK writers a simple question. What is the object — the physical, dusty, slightly embarrassing object — that started your latest book?

What follows is not a manifesto. It is a shelf.

Rhiannon Okafor and the Thimble That Outlived Its Owner

Cardiff-born Okafor writes historical fiction with an unusually keen eye for the inside of a workroom, and her new novel A Thousand Small Stitches (2026) began, she says, with a brass thimble she could not give away.

'My grandmother sewed for a living and never owned a sewing machine. When she died, the family divided up the good stuff — the china, the rings — and I got the thimble, because nobody else wanted it. It's worn down on one side. You can see exactly which finger she pushed through a thousand linings with. I wrote three pages of notes about her hands and then somehow had a novel about a woman who made clothes for people she despised.'

Read alongside: Common People by Alison Light, a family history that treats ordinary working lives as material worth excavating.

Douglas Petrie and the Ticket to a Museum That No Longer Exists

Petrie's non-fiction book The Last Cabinet of Curiosities grew out of a ticket stub from a Dundee museum that closed in the 1990s, found in a coat pocket during a house move. 'It's printed with a date and a price in shillings and pence,' he says. 'I sat on the stairs for forty minutes doing sums about how many people went through that door and what they thought they were going to see.'

His book follows the dispersal of small municipal collections — the cases, the labels, the stuffed things with fading fur — into skips, car boots and, occasionally, national archives.

Read alongside: The Museum of Whales You Will Never See by A. Kendra Greene, which understands that a collection is always a personality.

Ailsa Mundy and the Weather Vane That Pointed Wrong

Mundy writes what she calls 'domestic unease' — villages where the taps work but the atmosphere doesn't. Her third novel began with a faulty weather vane on a Suffolk outbuilding that had been installed by a well-meaning previous owner and now pointed south-east regardless of the wind.

'It ruined my sense of direction for a fortnight, and I found that enormously interesting. A village where one small thing is consistently, quietly wrong. Nobody mentions it. Everybody navigates around it. That's the whole book, really.'

Read alongside: Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees — a fantasy about the danger lurking at the borders of a very tidy town.

Theo Lindqvist-Bell and the Cassette With the Wrong Label

Theo Lindqvist-Bell bought a cassette at a car boot sale near Leeds because it was labelled Songs for the Drive Home in biro. What was actually on it was a 40-minute recording of what sounds like a parish council meeting from the late 1980s, plus two minutes of a child learning the recorder.

His novel-in-stories, Songs for the Drive Home, borrows the title and much of the mood. 'It's about the gap between what people label things and what things are. Which is, I think, the whole of adult life.'

Read alongside: The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, which treats an unreliable world with enormous good humour.

Priya Ramachandran and the Key Fob From a Demolished Hotel

A plastic key fob from a Blackpool hotel, purchased for 50p at a charity shop in Bolton, set Ramachandran writing about seaside landladies. 'It's the least glamorous object in my house and I am fierce about it,' she says. 'There's a room number embossed on it. Room 14 existed. Somebody slept there. Somebody had a row there.'

Her forthcoming novel is a comic, quietly furious book about women who ran guest houses and were written out of the seaside story.

Read alongside: The Offing by Benjamin Myers, for a very different British coast and a similar attentiveness to place.

Gus Trelawny and the Ruler With a Stranger's Name Burned Into It

Trelawny — carpenter, raconteur, first-time author at 61 — found a wooden ruler in a house clearance in Cornwall with the name E. Pellow burned into the reverse. He has never identified E. Pellow. The search became his memoir, Measure Twice.

'I bought a ruler and got a quest. That's the best 20p I've ever spent. I still don't know who he was, and I've made my peace with it. The book is about the pleasure of not finishing the job.'

Read alongside: The Measure of All Things by Ken Alder, a history of the metre and the people who nearly died establishing it.

Sidebar: Curiosity, Deliberately Cultivated

The writers above did not simply 'have' curiosity. Several of them described practices — small, habitual, mildly ridiculous — that keep the noticing machinery oiled.

• Keep a 'thing' drawer. Not a nice drawer. An ugly one. Objects go in, nothing comes out until it has been looked at properly at least once.
• Ask three questions about one object daily. Where was it made? Who touched it last? Why does it survive when its siblings did not?
• Follow the boring detail. Most of the authors described being pulled in not by the dramatic item but by a mundane one — a label, an embossed number, a misprint.
• Buy the 50p thing. Cheap objects carry enormous permission. Nobody expects a masterpiece from a key fob.
• Write 100 words on it before you decide what it is. Description first, interpretation later. This is the single most repeated piece of advice from the six.
• Let objects argue with each other. Put two unrelated things next to each other on a shelf and see what conversation starts. This is, arguably, the whole of Von Krummp's publishing philosophy, and we are not sorry.

The moral, if there is one: your next project is probably already in the house, and it is probably dusty. Go and look at it properly. It has been waiting for you, in the way that a thimble waits.