Defamiliarization: How to Make the Ordinary Feel Strange

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now here's your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. Episode 9. On today's show, we're talking about what is arguably the most important element of creative writing, defamiliarization.

All right, welcome back to the show. My name is Brad Reed. This is the show's website. I'm sure glad you're here. I can't believe we're starting month 3 of the show. Again, the response has been so rewarding, and I thank you for being out there listening.

A couple of things before we get into the podcast today. I do want to remind you that we've got show notes for each of these episodes at the show's website. You'll find the show notes for this particular episode at the show's website. In those show notes, you're going to find things like links to books and articles that we might reference in the show, as well as discussion about the topic. We're starting to get some people that are logging on there, asking questions, making some comments after the shows, and I really want to encourage that. I haven't had the time to go in and really respond the way that I'd like to, and I'm really hoping that I am not the guy to always do that.

I'm not the expert on any of these things. I'm a guy who loves writing, who loves talking about writing, who's just kind of putting out there the things that work for me, and I'm really hoping that these pages on the website will be a great place to hear from you, hear from you about questions you maybe have about a topic, about comments you'd like to make, clarifications that you'd like to make, or even arguments that you'd like to make about it, and really be a place for us to discuss these topics among the listeners, among you guys, as well as me when I can find the time to get on there and talk with you. So obviously my priority is getting this show out every week, and that precludes me from doing some of the other things I'd like to be doing.

So I do invite you to head on over to the show's website and check out the show notes for each of the episodes. You'll also find in the top right-hand side of that page just a little donate link, and I talked a little bit about this last week. We are starting to require a little bit of money to keep the show hosted, keep it running with the amount of downloads that we're getting, and if you can throw a few bucks our way to help offset those costs, that would be so much appreciated.

Introduction to Defamiliarization

So enough about that. Let's get into today's topic. It is called defamiliarization, which is a mouthful to get out, at least for me, and I'll probably stumble over it a few times during the podcast, but we'll see how that goes. For the discussion today, we're going to be leaning on an article by Victor Shlovsky.

Now, what a great name. I kind of want to put a character in one of my stories named Victor Shlovsky. Anyway, he was a Russian critic and writer who wrote an article in 1925 called Art as Technique. And really what I think Shlovsky was trying to do with this article is understand what makes art, art.

In other words, why is a poem art, but let's say an instruction manual is not art? Or why is a novel art, but the phone book is not art? And this is a question that really fascinated him and something he spent a lot of time studying. And within this article, he hits on several elements of what makes art, artful.

Now in this podcast, we're really only going to be talking about one of those elements, and that element is defamiliarization. It may be something that you're already familiar with. I hope so, because it is one of the best tools that we have in our toolbox to create compelling fiction.

But even if you are familiar with it, I hope you'll stick around for the discussion because we're going to take it in a couple of different directions that maybe you haven't explored before. So and if you haven't heard of it, if it's new to you, then all the more reason to to stay tuned to the podcast and see what we're talking about. So before we talk about defamiliarization, I think it's necessary for us to stop and really define what we mean by the familiar. That may seem self-evident, but I do want to explore it just a little bit. Shlovsky starts out his article by describing the familiar in this way. He says, if we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic.

Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic. If one remembers the sensation of holding a pen or of speaking in a foreign language for the first time and compares that with his feeling at performing the action for the 10,000th time, he will agree with us. So that's Shlovsky in his article. And again, you'll find that in the show notes if you want to read the whole thing.

But what I want to do is really put some clothes on that idea of what he's talking about in the way that he defines the familiar so we can so we can really get a sense of it. Shlovsky says that all our habits retreat into the area of the unconsciously automatic. And that's key for our understanding here. This happens to us all the time, doesn't it? I mean, remember back to the first time you drove to the house that you live in now. Does it seem like the same drive you make every day now?

I mean, I think back to when I first drove up to where we live now and I remember noticing virtually every house. I noticed the condition of the paint of every house. I noticed the trees and the type of trees that were along the road. I noticed the kind of cars that were parked in the driveways. I noticed seemingly every little detail of that. It was all new.

And yet now when I drive home, it's on automatic pilot. You know, I don't notice anything along the way. We're talking about living life on autopilot. That's what the familiar is. We've done the same things in the same places over and over again. And our readers have as well where we're all kind of living life on this autopilot.

And I think it's our job as writers to shake that up a little bit, to shock people out of that autopilot mode. What I want to do is a real quick experiment. I don't know how this is going to work out, but we'll give it a shot.

Now, I assume, I can't really assume to know where you're at as you're listening to this podcast, so I was going to pick an object that everybody might have lying around close to them to discuss. But obviously, if you're driving, you refer to your, at home, or if you're out for a walk while you're listening to this, we're not all going to have access to the same things. So what we're going to do is consider an object that I'm fairly certain most of you have, which is our hands.

So follow me here. What I want you to do is to just look at your hand. Now, really do this. Follow me. Follow me here. I think it'll be interesting.

So I want you to look at your hand. It's something you've seen a thousand times. So there's no surprise there, right? It's just your boring old hand.

Now I want you to look at it very closely. Now, if you're driving and maybe not quite as close, but let's see if we can make your hand unfamiliar. As you look at your hand, I want you to listen to a few facts about hands that you may not have known.

So your fingers are unique in that they have no muscles in them. There's only tendons in there that are operated from within your palm and your forearm. So in a sense, your fingers are kind of remote controlled on your body. Most hands have 29 bones, but a lot of people have more than that. Look at your hand and try to tell if you might have more. If you do, where might they be in your hand?

Now there are at least 123 ligaments in there. I want you to try to picture them. Imagine your hand if you could see right through the skin. What would it look like covered in 123 ligaments? A couple of questions for you. Why doesn't the skin in your palm grow hair?

And why won't it tan? Did you know that fingers are never straight? Have you ever noticed the way each of your fingers curves just a little bit? Take a look and see. Have you ever wondered why the skin on your palm doesn't just slip around like a loose glove the way the skin on other parts of your body does? Why do you suppose that is?

How does that work? I want you to look really closely at any spots that you might see. When did those show up? Freckles, maybe? Look at your palm. Notice all the little tiny fine lines that make up your palm print.

By now you should be looking at your hands as if you've never really seen them before. Your hands might be the thing you've seen most in your life. I think that's why we have the phrase, I know it like the back of my hand. And yet hopefully through this little experience you've just experienced some degree of defamiliarization by thinking about your hands in a different way than you have before.

So am I saying that if we mention hands in our fiction we have to write about them like we just discussed them? No. It's about picking the specific things, the characters, the plots, the settings, the events and things in your story that you want to highlight and deciding which ones you want your readers to experience in a new and a fresh way. It's these things you must so that our readers see it as if they've seen it, seeing it for the first time. They wake up to it.

So here's the good news. It's something that I'm certain you're already doing in your writing, at least to an extent. But by becoming aware of it, we can do it more intentionally and more effectively.

Let's look at some of the ways we probably are already defamiliarizing in our writing. And these extend a little bit from what Shlovsky talked about. So if you're a real Shlovsky purist, and I'm sure that they're out there, you may recognize that we're pushing the boundaries a little bit of what Shlovsky defined as defamiliarization.

But I want to see it in as clear a picture as we can. Some of the ways we already defamiliarize, we're already asking our readers to inhabit a person who is not themselves, to see the world from a different point of view. That's defamiliarization. We've put them in a place that they're probably not familiar with, unless somehow you're writing about a character that lives in the town where your reader is reading it. Then they're experiencing a place that's unfamiliar. They're defamiliarized to that place.

We also use metaphors and similes to force a fresh perspective. When we say one thing is like another, we compare one thing to another in a unique way, not a cliche, but in a unique way. Then we force our readers to look at something, to understand something that is usually familiar in a new way. We've dealt with this in some of our past episodes. You'll remember that we talked about the techniques of using reversal and random noun in Episode 3, where we talked about sparking your creativity. Those are all based on techniques of defamiliarization, forcing a comparison that we haven't seen before so that we can see something in a new way.

We also hit on it last week with the interview with Pam Houston in her Glimmers. I really think that glimmers are actually moments when we are, for whatever reason, defamiliarized from our world and that we wake up to see something or notice something. Often something that's been there all along, but something causes us to wake up and see it in a new way.

Levels of Defamiliarization

So that, that's defamiliarization. And that hopefully is a good introduction to three different levels of defamiliarization that I want to talk about today. The first level we're going to call traditional defamiliarization or think of it as sentence level defamiliarization.

Sentence Level Defamiliarization

The second level we're going to talk about is big picture defamiliarization. And the third, we're going to call self-reflective defamiliarization. So let's just jump right into the first one, traditional or sentence level defamiliarization. I think it helps to understand this in writing by looking at how it's accomplished in other arts, actually. For some reason, whenever I think of defamiliarization, I always think of a work of art that you might be familiar with. It's from Marcel Duchamp from 1917 and it's called The Fountain.

If you know this work of art, you're probably already smiling about it because you know what it is. It's basically a urinal. It's a urinal that he took out of a house, out of somewhere, and he put it in a museum. The only thing really different about it is he's like signed it with the name R. Mutt. I'm not sure anybody quite knows why, but it's basically just a urinal that found its way into a museum.

Now, this urinal is one of the most ordinary things. It's something we give no thought to. Yet when Duchamp put it into a different context, it was seen in a new way. Suddenly we had to look at it. We were forced to look at it as if it was a piece of art.

Now, there's debate over whether it actually is art or not, but there's really no debate on the fact that everyone who looks at it in that museum setting is forced to look at it in a new way. It's been defamiliarized. Now, replicas of it are on display in a number of museums. Maybe you've seen one of these replicas. I'd love to hear what you think of the experience.

Another way to think of it is think of photographs, of photography, of ordinary things but taken from a unique perspective, or maybe taken of a thing in an unexpected environment. We're forced to view it in a way that we've never quite looked at it before, and it becomes fresh to us. It becomes new to us. We're forced to experience it in a new way, waking up to the sense of what that thing is. That's what we're trying to do with our fiction. We're trying to wake up our readers so that they see the things that we're writing about.

Shlovsky uses the example of Tolstoy often in his article to illuminate what he means by defamiliarization. He describes defamiliarization, and this is really key here. If you're going to take notes on this or really equate defamiliarization with one thing, it is this. Defamiliarization is describing an object as if we have never seen it, as if we're seeing it for the first time, or describing an event as if it were happening for the first time. And Shlovsky uses Tolstoy as an example of this. In a story called Shame, Tolstoy defamiliarizes the idea of flogging in this way.

This is some of the way he describes it. He says, To strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor, and to wrap on their bottoms with switches. A few lines later, he says, It's to lash about on the naked buttocks.

Now, he could have just said that they were flogged or talked about flogging. And we would have registered that in our head. And because we're familiar with the term and we kind of know what flogging is, we wouldn't have woken up to it.

But by describing it as if we've never seen it, then we wake up to it. We see it in kind of a fresh, new way. Now, I'm not sure that that's the greatest example. And I did some digging for better examples. And I didn't have a lot of time to dig too far.

So I ended up just using, looking at one from what I'm reading right now. I'm reading Great Gatsby again, like maybe half the country. You know, maybe we've read it once in high school. And now the big movie's out.

So we want to read it again before we see the movie. Well, that's what I'm up to now. And as I was reading through it and thinking about this idea of defamiliarization, I guess my radar was up to a little bit. And I noticed one little moment. It's very subtle, but it's when he's describing Jordan Baker, the first time that Nick sees Jordan Baker. And he could have just said that she held her head high.

Instead, he describes it as if she is balancing something on her chin, carefully balancing something on her chin. Now that made me see her body posture and really understand her character in a completely different way because I woke up to what it looks like to hold your head high. And she holds her head high in a very specific way when he describes it this way. It's a defamiliarization with something as basic as the way that Jordan holds her head and becomes alive to us. We wake up to it and we notice it. It becomes important to us.

Okay, so this is what I think of as sentence level defamiliarization or traditional defamiliarization. And the key is to look for ways to describe things as if your character or your narrator has never experienced them before. And your reader will share in that experience. Or you can place ordinary things, things that we're used to, in a unique place or a unique situation or environment. And by doing that, they'll become new to our readers. They'll wake up to them.

So that is the level of defamiliarization that I think most of us as writers are hopefully already somewhat familiar with. That's the basic defamiliarization, making the familiar strange. But I want to do, what I want to do is go a little bit deeper.

Big Picture Defamiliarization

Let's see how this concept can be even more fully deployed in our writing by moving on to the second level of defamiliarization. And I'll call it big picture defamiliarization. And it really asks this question, what are we trying to accomplish with our writing? You know, I think sometimes we're trying to create something like the other books that are out there. Something that can earn a place alongside them on a bookstore shelf. I mean, we look at other successful books in our niche and we ask ourselves if we can write something like that.

Can I do something like what's already out there? And I think to some extent, that's the wrong approach. If our goal is to simply create something that already fits with what people are familiar with, then it's not really going to get noticed. I mean, imagine this. If there are 30 pine trees on your drive home from work and somebody plants a 31st pine tree, are you going to even notice it? I wouldn't.

I'd fly right by it. It wouldn't even be on my radar. We don't want to be adding just another pine tree, so to speak, to the forest. We want something that gets noticed.

So that, for me, is big picture defamiliarization. We want to write something that wakes our audience up, that gets noticed, that is something that they're not used to. An example of this, I think, comes in a book by Don DeLillo. He wrote a book called Mao II. I don't know how well known it is. It's something that is a fascinating read, though, if you're a writer.

I recommend it. There's a link for it on the website if you go on over to the show's website. You'll find information on it as well as the article we're discussing and all Terrorism will actually never work to achieve the ends that the terrorists have. Yes, their acts are horrible. They're cowardly. They're despicable.

They're tragic, but they also have this other effect of shocking us out of our sleepwalking. They wake us up to the reality of the world. Who didn't see the world in a different way after 9/11? Who didn't look at their children in a different way after Newtown? These acts of terror, as awful as they are, they also defamiliarize us to the world. They wake us up and we see it new.

That's what I think DeLillo is getting at when he says that terrorists have taken over where writers have dropped the ball. And, you know, it's not that writers are supposed to be shocking the world in the same way that terrorists are, I don't think. I'm not saying that every book needs to have the same effect as a terrorist attack. I mean, God forbid it. I know this is a tough comparison.

But what I am saying is that writing is meant to wake people up, to force them to see the world in a new way. And this character, Bill Gray, in DeLillo's work, is very aware of the fact, or he very much believes the fact, that writers have dropped the ball, that they are not waking up the world in the way that they're writing. And he says terrorists have kind of stepped in and filled this role.

So I think we are. I mean, that's part of where I agree with Don DeLillo in this, is that in a sense, writers really are called to wake up the world to what they're writing about. And I'm including genre fiction here, along with literary fiction. If we are just churning out a slightly different version of the books that are already out there, then what are we adding to the world? Really nothing. I mean, our readers, they may enjoy our stories.

They may read them, but in a sense, they're sleepwalking through them. We're not waking them up. They leave the same as when they started. I mean, don't we want our books to stick with people? Don't we want our readers to carry our characters around in their heads for the rest of their lives? I think we do that through big picture defamiliarization.

We do that by waking up our readers with our stories. That's big picture defamiliarization to me. It asks the questions, what is your story about? What makes it different enough that it's not just another pine tree in the forest? How will your readers see the world, or at the very least, your genre in a new way when they close your book? How can your story be the urinal in the museum?

How's that for an image? Now, did you notice that even that last discussion of defamiliarization works using the principle of defamiliarization? I mean, Don DeLillo asks us to see writers as terrorists. That's something that wakes us up. It's definitely a new perspective on the writer, and it forces us to see our jobs differently. Whether you agree with the connection or not, and I hope it's not offensive, but maybe for some of us it needs to be to see our work differently, to take a fresh perspective on it.

Self-Reflective Defamiliarization

Okay, let's move on to the third level, and for me, really kind of the most interesting level of defamiliarization, and I'm going to call it self-reflective defamiliarization, and it has to do with how we see our work. Because no matter how original and defamiliarizing our work is to the world, it becomes familiar to us as we work on it. I mean, we get to know the plot. We get to know the characters. We get to know the story in great detail. We become very familiar with it.

You know, let's keep the example of the urinal in the museum running here. If you've spent day after day with that urinal in the museum, I mean, you know, maybe you're the security guard that's guarding it. I don't know if they have one.

But let's pretend that they do, and that's your job. You spend every day there with that urinal in the museum. It becomes normal. It kind of disappears from your radar. You're no longer woken up to the defamiliarization that's going on there. By the way, I'm going to take just a little sidetrack here because I think it's important for us to understand that cliches are actually attempts at defamiliarization.

They're defamiliarization that has been done so many times that it's just no longer interesting. You know, it disappears. I was writing the other day, and I wrote the phrase burst into tears, and I stopped to think about it a little bit. And I thought, you know what? That's actually, well, yes, it's a cliche, but it's actually defamiliarization that's been done so many times that it doesn't mean anything anymore. We don't even notice it.

I mean, when we hear somebody burst into tears, we don't think of what it probably originally meant the first time somebody said it, which is the idea that you build up so much pressure with these tears and you're holding them back and suddenly it's just the pressure is too great and you burst with them. Well, we don't think about that anymore. We think bursting with tears is just something people do.

So that's how things become cliches, I think. They're attempts at defamiliarization that have been used so many times that they're no longer unfamiliar. They're no longer strange. And that's kind of what we're getting at with this idea of self-reflective defamiliarization. If we've seen something so often, even if it's strange or unfamiliar, it becomes familiar. And that happens when we're writing our own work.

So we need to take steps, I think, to consciously be always defamiliarizing ourselves with the work that we are doing as we are writing and especially as we're revising. We must be deliberately defamiliarizing ourselves with our work so it stays fresh, so it stays interesting, so it stays malleable for us. Now again, we've talked about a few of the ways to do this in some of our previous podcasts, especially with the technique of reversals and the random noun technique. If you're not familiar with those, if you missed episode three, I hope you'll go back and check it out because they really are pertinent to this discussion.

But another way that we can defamiliarize ourselves with our own work is to.. One way I really like is to write from a different perspective. Now I've heard people that actually go through and they'll do an entirely new draft from a perspective of one of the other characters. If that works for you, great. That's too much for me. I'm not going to go there.

But one thing that I do that I think really works for this is that when I start to sense that I'm getting too familiar with my story, I'm getting too married to some of the ideas, to some of the plot points, and I'm not seeing the different directions that I could go, I'll sit down and I'll actually write letters from my non-point-of-view characters to myself explaining why they're in the story. In fact, I go through kind of a role-playing, I guess you could say, in my mind where I imagine that these characters have heard that I'm writing a book about this story and they want to make sure that their side is told, that their motivations are understood. So I'll sit down and I'll write a letter from them to me telling me things like, well, this is the way I saw this story happen. This is the reason that I behaved this way or reacted this way in the story. And a really fascinating thing that they'll do is they'll start telling me how they think other characters are misrepresenting what happened. Sometimes they outright accuse the other person of lying, which is really fun to kind of start having this conversation with your other characters.

But it breaks your story apart. It defamiliarizes it and gives you all these other perspectives to bring to bear on the story. Another technique, I've tried it. It doesn't necessarily work great for me, but it does for some people, is to write in a new way. If you usually write on your computer, try handwriting a section or the reverse if you're a handwriting person. Or go write in a new place.

Go to the library and write. Go to the park and write. Go to a coffee shop and write. Go somewhere new and for some people that causes them to see their work in a new way. Or use a new technique. A bunch of them we've talked about on this show.

Things like glimmers or going back to Alan Heathcock's approach. You know, go find a scene from a movie that's trying to capture what you're trying to capture and write that scene as if it's fiction and let that experience break open your writing so that you see it in a defamiliarized perspective. So we're going to go ahead and close there because we're running a little bit. Well, I guess we're doing all right on time, but we've gone a little long with the last couple of interviews.

So we'll keep it a little bit shorter today. So that's defamiliarization. And I hope that we can have a little bit of a discussion about this over on the show's website for the specific page. And again, I don't want to be the guy that steps into every discussion there. I'm not the answer guy. You know, what I say isn't always the truth for everybody.

It doesn't always work for everybody. So I'm really hoping that becomes a place where we can all discuss these things, where you'll respond to other people's questions or comments or criticisms, and we can have a discussion there. And I hope we can do that with this topic.

Weekly Writing Challenge

So we'll go ahead and move on to our weekly challenge. What I want you to do is, you know what? Go ahead and try the letter from a non-POV character technique. or most often read books for writers. At least I hope it is. If you haven't read this, you know, again, I'll put up a link to this on the on the show notes section.

So jump over there and grab a copy of this book. You're going to love it. Before I read this advice, I, you know, I guess I should apologize for the language. I feel like I don't need to, but I think as I was submitting the podcast to some of the directories and things, I said it's probably gonna have a clean rating.

So, you know, I guess when, when language comes up, I'm gonna just flag that. So if you happen to be sensitive to that, then there's gonna be a little bit. So, so you're forewarned. You probably, if you're familiar with Bird by Bird, already know where I'm going with this now.

So, here is just a very quick snippet of a whole section that Anne Lamott writes about first drafts. And here's what she says. She says, for me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. I love that. I really should take that and post it up above my computer because I always forget this advice.

And that's why I think it's a good reminder, even if you've heard it time and time and time again. I always forget this advice. Always.

So actually what I've started doing, maybe this is a little out there, a little nuts, but I actually use that in all my titles when I'm drafting. In other words, if I'm sitting down to do my first draft of a new story, my working title becomes a shitty version of blank, whatever it is. And I see that every time I sit down to write, which reminds me, take the pressure off. Just get the words down. I even title the chapters within shitty chapter one and shitty chapter two. It works for me.

It helps me get that reminder. Sometimes I'll even highlight an especially shitty line as I write it and it becomes kind of a celebration. I really have some fun with it, you know, that that I can kind of confirm my confirm for myself, man, I must be doing this right because look at this shitty line I just wrote and I have some fun with it.

So write shitty first drafts. I know I'm not supposed to stop and explain the the wise words and talk about them. It's kind of been one of my rules I've been trying to go by, but Dang it, you know, it's my podcast. I'll break the rules every once in a while because This is one I just felt like talking a little bit more about.

So next week I'm gonna leave you up in the air a little bit. I'm still working on getting a couple of different interviews to come together. I'm really excited about them. If I can get those to happen this week, then that will be next week's podcast. If not Then it's just going to be a surprise. You're gonna have to tune in and See what?

Has been preoccupying me this week and what I feel moved to talk about so until next week. I hope you'll remember the best way to improve your craft is by writing shitty first drafts That's what I'm going to go do and I hope you're off to do the same Let's get some words on paper this week and we'll meet up again next week for another episode of inside creative writing. com Thanks for listening to the inside creative writing. com podcast with your host writer and educator Brad Reed We'll be back next week, but until then join the conversation at inside creative writing.