Defamiliarization will transform your scenes from prosaic sketches into haunting images that live on in your reader’s memory long after they have left the page.

What is defamiliarization?

I take my definition from Charles Baxter,1 who borrows the concept from Gerard Manley Hopkins. Baxter writes, “Hopkins appeared to believe that images became memorable when some crucial part of their meaning had been stripped from them.” Hopkins called these “widowed images,” which become memorable because of their strangeness.

Conversely, images that are too predictable or too familiar fade immediately from our memories.

Baxter cites the typical eulogy as an example:

If stories and novels used the selective form of funeral elegies, no one would read them. Characters who are entirely likable or admirable – who are remembered in the way that funeral elegies remember people — have a tendency to become either allegorical or bland. Narrated this way, they don’t stay in the memory. Perversely, they vanish instead.

It’s understandable that people paint saintly pictures of their loved ones when they are grieving. But if you did not know the departed, those eulogies just don’t ring true. Similarly, when we pick up a novel or memoir, we are asked to care about characters who are strangers to us. The only way we’ll feel something real is if those characters don’t fit a predictable mold. The same is true for setting, for plot, for all the elements of a story.

If you’d like to revivify your own memoir, novel, or short story with this technique, consider some of the guidelines for making the familiar strange.

Image: Start with the familiar, then strip away meaning or add elements of surprise

Structure: Juxtapose contrasting memories for dramatic tension

Theme: Locate the borders of two worlds (night/day, faith/doubt, dreaming/waking)

Plot: If all of the arrows are pointing one way, find an exception to the rule

Characterization: Avoid oversimplified depictions of people

Now try one of the following prompts:

Pick a memory that you recall clearly. Take us to that scene and flesh out the sensory details. Aim for at least two paragraphs to develop the scene as vividly as if it were playing out on the screen. Now step back and look at the imagery. What makes it memorable? Rework the scene to strip away familiarity from some of the images. Include unexpected details or associations that will linger longer in a reader’s imagination.

If you have a work in progress, adapt the second part of the exercise above as a revision tool to see your scenes with fresh eyes. Is there anything haunting in your imagery, or is it too familiar? Do you resolve the meaning of your scenes too tidily for your readers, so there is nothing left to finish within the reader’s thoughts, or are you leaving some dissonance or loose ends for the reader to carry away within herself? Are you turning the volume down on your disturbing scenes, or taking any of that action offstage?

Pick a character you might develop in an essay and write at least two paragraphs introducing us to that character in a scene. How might you introduce details into this character’s appearance or mannerisms that might work against a neat identity theme? What contradictions or flaws might you build into this character to balance their more admirable qualities and make them feel more real to readers?

If you are working on a memoir, adapt the exercise above using Baxter’s example of the stale eulogy. If you were writing a eulogy for one of your characters with a stranger in mind, how might you capture the “failures and oddities” of your character such that a stranger might be able to identify with them?

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