How 'Defamiliarisation' Can Transform Your Writing
An advanced lesson from the science of storytelling
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When the writer successfully describes something, they create an alternative reality into which their reader becomes transported. To achieve this effect, they can use specific detail that’s credible and sensory and somewhat surprising – a well-drawn passage might include an unexpected but still believable detail that helps make the scene ‘come alive’ in the reader’s imagination. From a science of storytelling perspective, this is pretty much what’s happening on the page: the writer creates a proxy conscious experience that takes over the reader’s actual consciousness. But there’s also a kind of advance mode of descriptive writing, used by many sophisticated authors, that creates an additional, magical effect. They call it ‘defamiliarisation’.
Because defamiliarisation has been studied by literary critics, its precise definitions are varied and can be opaque. But, most simply put, it’s the art of making the familiar seem unfamiliar, thereby making it seem new. Defamiliarisation was first defined in 1917 by the Russian author Viktor Shklovsky. In his essay ‘Art as Device’, Shklovsky noted that, in life, we often recognise familiar objects without truly seeing them. “After being perceived several times, objects acquire the status of ‘recognition.’,” he wrote. “An object appears before us. We know it's there but we do not see it, and, for that reason, we can say nothing about it.” An author can take advantage of this phenomenon by finding a way of describing an object or situation in such a way that it’s made to feel strange, and therefore fresh. This aids narrative transportation, and also fascination, as we’re nudged into seeing some aspect of the world anew.