Reexamining the Familiar

Writers often struggle most with the subjects they know best. A childhood kitchen, a familiar city street, the face of a parent, the rituals of a marriage: these things may feel vivid in memory, yet on the page they can flatten into shorthand. The writer already knows what the room looked like and what the relationship meant. The reader does not. The difficulty lies in seeing the material again.

The Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovsky gave this problem one of its most enduring names: defamiliarization, or ostranenie. In his 1917 essay “Art as Technique,” Shklovsky argued that ordinary perception becomes automatic. We stop really noticing objects, gestures, phrases, and experiences because familiarity makes them easy to recognize. Art interrupts that process. By making something strange, difficult, or newly visible, the writer forces us to perceive it rather than simply identify it.

The idea can sound theoretical, but its application to writing is immediate. Consider how often fiction relies on phrases whose meaning arrives before their imagery does: a character’s “heart sank,” a room is “cozy,” someone is “beautiful,” a city street is “bustling.” These expressions are efficient because we already know what they mean. Their weakness is the same. They ask very little of the imagination.

Defamiliarization does not mean replacing every familiar phrase with an elaborate metaphor. In fact, conspicuous originality can become its own kind of habit. The goal is to recover the particularity of an experience.

Kafka does this almost immediately in The Metamorphosis. Gregor Samsa awakens to discover that he has been transformed into a monstrous insect, but the story refuses the emotional response we might expect. Gregor worries about missing his train and displeasing his employer. The fantastic event is narrated with bureaucratic irritation. Work, family obligation, and ordinary domestic life become stranger because the impossible transformation is treated as one more practical inconvenience.

Virginia Woolf often achieves a subtler version of the same effect. In Mrs Dalloway, London is recognizable, but perception continually transforms it. Cars, shop windows, bells, airplanes, fragments of conversation, and memories move through the consciousness of different characters. A walk through familiar streets becomes an unstable arrangement of sensations and associations. Woolf is not inventing an unfamiliar city. She is making familiar experience newly perceptible.

Defamiliarization can also operate at the level of character. Writers frequently rely on social categories because categories are quick. A character is “an overbearing mother,” “a lonely old man,” “a rebellious teenager.” These descriptions may be accurate, but they contain conclusions rather than observations. A reader has little reason to look more closely.

The more interesting work often begins when the writer asks what this particular person does that makes us arrive at that conclusion. Perhaps the overbearing mother straightens the silverware while her adult daughter is speaking. Perhaps the lonely man leaves the television on in a room he is not occupying. Such details resist summary. They allow the reader to experience the character before deciding what the character means.

Overfamiliarity is difficult to diagnose from inside a manuscript because the writer has lived with the material for months or years. A scene may feel emotionally powerful because the writer remembers the event behind it. A description may seem complete because the writer can picture everything that has been left unstated. A creative writing coach encounters only what is actually on the page. They can point to moments where language has become automatic: abstractions that substitute for scenes, familiar emotional vocabulary, gestures borrowed from cinematic convention, or descriptions that identify rather than reveal. The response need not be “make this more original.” That instruction is too vague to help. More useful questions concern perception. What exactly does the character notice? What would someone else fail to notice? Which physical detail carries the emotional pressure of the scene?

This approach is particularly valuable in autobiographical fiction and creative nonfiction. Writers working from memory face a strange disadvantage: they know too much. They know that their childhood home was comforting, that their father was intimidating, that a certain summer represented the end of something. Those meanings can harden into an explanation before the scene has had a chance to exist.

Revision can restore some of the uncertainty of the original experience. Instead of telling us that a father was intimidating, the writer might return to the sound of his boots in the hallway. Instead of announcing that a family dinner was tense, the writer might notice who keeps refilling the water glasses, who avoids looking across the table, and which subject everyone carefully leaves untouched.

Defamiliarization ultimately asks the writer to resist recognition for a little longer. The familiar phrase, the familiar character type, the familiar interpretation may all be correct, but correctness is rarely enough to create vivid prose. Literature gives the reader an opportunity to encounter something before naming it. For the writer, that means learning to look twice. For the coach, it means helping the writer discover where the manuscript has stopped looking at all.