Six drawer pulls run across the front of an old dresser, and five of them are dull. One is bright, worn back to the bare brass, because that is the drawer somebody opened every day while the other five held socks and spare buttons and got opened twice a year. That bright pull is a record of use, and no one meant to keep it.
Wear is slow. A grip does not darken a saw handle in a season. It takes years of the same hand closing on the same wood in the same place, until the finish is gone there and nowhere else. It cannot be hurried, and it cannot be faked convincingly, because faked wear reads wrong to anyone who has looked at the real thing. Steel wool over a handle lays the marks evenly all over, and true wear is never even. It goes where the hand goes and stops where the hand stops.
Habit, not intention
Wear is a record of habit, not of intention. It shows what a person did, over and over, whatever they would say about it. A man will tell you he treats all his tools the same, and his chisels show something else. Two of them are worn bright at the grip and the rest are clean, and those two are the ones he reaches for without thinking about it.
Wear and damage
Damage and wear are not the same, and the difference is time. Wear is the sum of a thousand ordinary days, and damage is one bad afternoon. A chair rail rubbed pale along its length is wear, the passing of a lot of shoulders over a lot of years. A gouge out of the same rail is damage, one moving job or one dropped ladder, and it happened once.
Reading a thing means separating the two. A crack points to a single event, and to roughly when the piece stopped being trusted. A worn spot is a different kind of news. It marks a routine that ran for years.
Where a life touches a thing
When I put an object in a story, I try to wear it where the character's life actually touches it. A woman who has climbed the same doorstep for forty years has worn a hollow into it, dead center and a little to the left, because she carries the wash on her right hip. A key on a crowded ring has lost its plating while the others keep theirs, so I know which lock she uses daily and which she has not touched in years. A path crosses her lawn where the paved walk takes the long way around, because people cut the corner to the door and the grass there is worn to dirt.
Not one of those marks is decoration. Each mark does a job a paragraph of description could not do as well. It shows the reader something true about how a person lives, without stopping to announce itself, and a sharp reader can use it later.
The novel I am finishing is full of such marks, and most readers will walk right past them, which is the point. They are there to be found on the second read. A worn thing keeps the record of its use, made by no one and free to anyone who stops to look. I spent a working life learning to read those records. Now I put them in on purpose.