Use All Five Senses to Describe Your … Junk Drawer

Or your junk closet. Or maybe your junk basement. We have a junk playroom, now that my kids are teens, but I couldn’t take a picture of that room or my husband would die of embarrassment. So I settle for asking to use all five senses to describe your junk drawer. Like the last two writing prompts, write down your first impressions as you look at the items in your junky space.

• Sight: Lots of pencils. Gift card. Tools. Batteries. Foam darts. Bobbers. Etc.
• Sound: N/A
• Touch: All sorts of textures–smooth, scratchy, rough
• Taste: N/A
• Smell: Leather

How can I use these impressions? I could write a comedic story about a mom cleaning out the family junk drawer and horrors she uncovers. Or a teen searching frantically for an important item.

I like the idea of characters finding something unexpected. Such as teens or twenty somethings are cleaning out the house of their late great-grandmother and find an item in her junk drawer that sets them on a quest through her past. Or a husband finds an item so odd that he has to discover who in the family put it there. When everyone denies it belongs to them, he has a mystery on his hands.

For more prompts in your own backyard, click here.