Defamiliarisation - a fun way to embrace the strange in your writing

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

In last week’s free Writing Talk post, I talked about embracing the strange in your writing work. It provoked a very positive response, and is already one of my most popular posts, so I thought it was worth exploring an aspect of the strange in this post, which also contains some fun exercises for my paid subscribers.

I’m talking about the writing craft technique of Defamiliarisation. This is defined by David Lodge in his book The Art of Fiction (which, by the way, is a useful book of literary craft to have on your bookshelves) as follows:

Defamiliarization is the usual English translation of ostranenie (literally, “making strange”), another of those invaluable critical terms coined by the Russian Formalists. In a famous essay first published in 1917, Victor Shklovsky argued that the essential purpose of art is to overcome the deadening effects of habit by representing familiar things in unfamiliar ways.’

Defamiliarisation pops up all over the place in art, music and literature. For example, the picture at the top of this page shows the Museum Of The Moon, an installation by British artist Luke Jerram, who often takes a familiar object and puts it in an unusual setting to make you see that object with fresh perspective.

Similarly, the story I mentioned in last week’s piece, Nature, by Cheryl Pappas, is a great example. The author takes the idea of a factory workplace and reframes it through a bizarre series of events and the addition of a secret room down in the bowels of the building, in order to produce a unique and emotional resonant story.

Defamiliarisation can be a fun way to warm up your creative muscles, so I have added not one but TWO writing exercises for my paid subscribers, and a great example of a defamiliarisation story, behind the paywall. Enjoy!