Cluttered or Cleanly?
Where does your character fall on a scale from Hoarder to Marie Kondo?
Use order or disorder, clutter or its absence, to illuminate a character through the spaces they inhabit and the objects they fill them with. You could explore this with pretty much any class of possessions: shoes under a bed, clothes in a closet, knickknacks on a windowsill, junk in a drawer, books on a shelf.
The protagonist of Elias Canetti’s wild novel Auto-Da-Fé turns out to be a monster who cares far more for books than human beings. His library seems impressive initially, but it is gradually revealed to be the creation of an obsessive madman. Its description in the novel’s first chapter always evokes in me a mixture of awe and dread. I, like Canetti’s Professor Kien, think of libraries as sacred places, but Kien’s is so holy it is frightening. It always makes me think about my relationship to my own books and whether my own fantasy library would be ruthlessly organized like Kien’s or if, perhaps, I’d just prefer a larger edition of my own current (and to me, delightfully) disorganized bookshelves.
His library was situated on the fourth and topmost floor of No. 24 Ehrlich Strasse. The door of the flat was secured by three highly complicated locks. He unlocked them, strode across the hall, which contained nothing except an umbrella and coat-stand, and entered his study. Carefully he set down the brief-case on an armchair. Then once and again he paced the entire length of the four lofty, spacious communicating rooms which formed his library. The entire wall-space up to the ceiling was clothed with books. Slowly he lifted his eyes towards them. Skylights had been let into the ceiling. He was proud of his roof-lighting. The windows had been walled up several years before after a determined struggle with his landlord. In this way he had gained in every room a fourth wall-space: accommodation for more books. Moreover illumination from above, which lit up all the shelves equally, seemed to him more just and more suited to his relations with his books. The temptation to watch what went on in the street – an immoral and time-wasting habit – disappeared with the side windows. Daily, before he sat down to his writing desk, he blessed both the idea and its results, since he owed to them the fulfillment of his dearest wish: the possession of a well-stocked library, in perfect order and enclosed on all sides, in which no single superfluous article of furniture, no single superfluous person could lure him from his serious thoughts.
PROMPT: Describe a space and its contents in such a way as to illuminate your character's personality. Ask yourself, too, Who's noticing all this? Is it the owner of the highly organized library or the messy desk or the overflowing closet? Is it their friend or child, plumber or lover? Or the person cleaning out their apartment after their death? Whoever, whatever, where ever, make sure the place and stuff you decide to write about are meaningful to your character, freighted with emotional baggage.