Episode 9: Defamiliarization

Inside Creative Writing—Weekly Podcast on Craft & Technique for Writers of Fiction and Creative Nonfiction

Duchamp’s “Fountain”: an example of defamiliarization

What is “defamiliarization?” How does it function in our writing? Can it be applied to “big picture” elements like plot and theme? How can we use it to break apart our own familiarity with what we are writing?

These are the questions we tackle in this episode of the show.

Defamiliarization is the technique of making the familiar seem strange so that our readers experience something in a new way, from a new angle, and gain a new understanding of it. The term “defamiliarization” was coined by Russian critic and writer Viktor Schklovsky in his 1925 essay “Art as Technique” in which he explores what distinguishes art from what is not art.

We discuss defamiliarization on three levels:

I – Traditional (or sentence-level) Defamiliarization

Brad uses examples from Schklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” Tolstoy’s “Shame!” and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Traditional defamiliarization is describing an object as if we are seeing it for the first time, or an event as if it were happening for the first time. It is making the familiar strange.

II – “Big Picture” Defamiliarization

Brad discusses Don DeLillo’s Mao II in which he explores how writers are like terrorists. It’s an example of defamiliarization, but also holds insights into our responsibility to “wake the world” up from being on auto-pilot.

III – Self-reflective Defamiliarization

As we write our stories, we become familiar with them. Brad discusses techniques we can use to defamiliarize ourselves with our writing so that we can see it in a new way, break it open to new possibilities, and keep it fresh.

Weekly challenge: Try the “letter from a non-POV character” technique. Choose a lesser character in your story—one that is not already sharing their point of view—and write yourself a letter as if it is coming from them to you. Pretend that they’ve heard you are writing the story and they want you to see things from their perspective. Talk about motivations for why they did things, how they felt when certain things happened, moments when they feel like the main POV character is lying—or at least misrepresenting—something. See your story from a new perspective by literally seeing it from a new perspective.

Our Wise Word this week is from Ann Lamott’s “Bird by Bird”
“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.”

Please feel free to join in the discussion by leaving a comment, question, or criticism of today’s show in the comments section below!