Embrace the strange in your writing

Unleashing the potential of the off-beat and the odd

Photo by Bruce Warrington on Unsplash

“Strangeness is a necessary ingredient in beauty.” - Charles Baudelaire

Before reading on, try this little exercise. Write down as many synonyms as you can for the word ‘strange’. These can be words that are closely related to strangeness or have a more tangential link. Give it a whirl (I’ve put together a list of my own at the bottom of this post).

You might surprise yourself with how many words come to you, because it turns out strangeness covers a wide spectrum. It goes through odd, peculiar, curious, along to off-kilter and incongruous and on to weird, wacky, bizarre.

It is this sheer range of options that holds significance for us as writers because it enables us to use different amounts of strangeness, like seasoning in a recipe, to add different flavours at different strengths. In other words, embracing an element of ‘strangeness’ in your work doesn’t have to mean something completely wacky and bizarre. You could be subtle, adding a quirky detail about a character that makes the reader question their preconceptions. Of course, you could be bolder, taking the whole story in a surreal direction, like some of the stories I have highlighted further down this piece.

The point of all of this is to produce work that piques the reader’s curiosity by intriguing them, making them curious, or surprised, or amused, or moved, by subverting their expectations, by adding depth.

The strange is a particularly useful thing when you are struggling for inspiration. Or when you sense your writing has become a bit insipid or stuck in a rut. Here’s some compelling reasons:  

1.     It can help us look at potentially familiar, everyday themes or relationships or situations and give them a fresh twist and energy.

2.     It can create a narrative that doesn’t feel inevitable, but surprises and engages the reader.

3.     It helps identify a tone and mood or emotional register that you can develop.

4.     It offers seduction – part of the art of writing is to seduce the reader to continue reading, elements of strangeness, surprise, intrigue, the plain bizarre encourages readers to go deeper into your piece.

One of the simplest methods to liven up your inspiration is something I call Strange Bedfellows. By this I mean the magic that can happen when you put two (or more) random or contradictory things together. You see this often in art, in poetry, photography and in movies. For example, who hasn’t seen a comedy movie when two seemingly very different people are forced together and make the best of it? ‘Hilarity’ ensues as they struggle to get over their differences and find they have more in common than…well you know the rest.

In any kind of fiction, finding connection and/or friction between Strange Bedfellows can be very potent, producing work that ranges from the off-kilter and weird to profound and emotionally involving. The bedfellows in question could be anything – characters, different characteristics within one person, moods/emotions, objects, settings and situations, opinions etc. The point is about what happens in you as writer when you mix them together, what surprising ideas or tensions bubble up.

Take the story Nature, by Cheryl Pappas as an example. Here the strange bedfellows are the setting of a seemingly ordinary garment factory, and the inciting incident of one of the workers being frozen in place for 24 hours. This imbues the story with a fantastical tone, but also a sense of hard reality intruding until the status quo is restored at the end.  

It’s worth reading through and identifying the elements of the strange that occur in this story and how they, coupled with the elements of reality at play, make the themes and ideas of this story more powerful - working conditions for women, the treatment of their traumas, dehumanisation of a workforce. All of these real world themes are brought out by elements of surreal strangeness.

It's not just at the initial inspiration stage that strangeness can be useful. It can also help us to enrich your work at that development and editing stage. The key point that unites all of this is that the use of the strange is not done in a fake, false, attention-seeking way. It is done for a purpose.

• Introducing an unexpected turn of events to intrigue the reader. This might help a stuck story unfold in a new direction. A classic example is Bullet In The Brain by Tobias Wolff. This is a story which initially uses a quite stock situation and setting a bank robbery, but then takes an unusual turn of events. Again there has to be purpose here. For me this is about voice and characterisation. We are set up, as readers by Tobias Wolff with an expectation about the main character, then the unexpected bizarre thing happens and we see a different aspect and it adds a profound poignancy to things.

• Using the strange to add depth or a different tone through an element of setting or situation – We see this in The Colonel by Carol Fordyche. And she is describing a dinner party essentially and then drops in one incongruous detail by mentioning a gun within a load of mundane descriptions and suddenly we sense the temperature of the story plummeting. So here is the power of the one odd detail to affect the tone of your story. Be specific and think about particular and peculiar details which can enliven otherwise mundane situations.

• Using fable, fairytale, folktale or magical realism – This gives you the freedom to move your story into a new realm. So take Sarah Hall’s story Mrs Fox, which uses that classic motif of metamorphosis (the main character shapeshifts into a fox) very effectively. Again there is purpose – Sarah Hall does it in order to illustrate the story’s themes around understanding – how well can we really know someone, even that we are very close to. And about the transformative power of parenthood.

• For comedic effect – A classic example is Donald Barthelme’s The School. This story basically just takes the idea of the bizarre and keeps on escalating it, with all its Postmodern wryness - through a series of disastrous situations at a school. And then it gets really strange. What this process does is enable the author to create both something really unsettling but also really funny. Again, purpose.

Strangeness is a great thing to utilise as a writer. Sprinkle some on your work, you might find the results to be…extraordinary!

My list of synonyms for strange:  Astonishing, aberrant, abnormal, alien, apart, astounding, atypical, awkward, bizarre, curious, detached, different, eccentric, erratic, exceptional, extraordinary, fantastic, far-out, funny, idiosyncratic, incongruous, irregular, mystifying, newfangled, novel, odd, offbeat, outlandish, peculiar, perplexing, quaint, queer, rare, remarkable, taboo, unusual, unaccountable, unaccustomed, uncanny, uncommon, unfamiliar, singular, weird.

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