
By ALCG Books
October 2, 2023
There's something about great storytelling that feels effortless. Words reach your mind at an emotionally rewarding pitch and drama unfolds in an attention-grabbing sequence, sometimes in ways that feel inevitable. Characters are unique enough to feel strange, yet familiar enough to stir or trigger your deep emotions.
As writers, we know what goes into great storytelling, but when we sit down to write, words sometimes fail us; sometimes our imaginations fail us, too.
Have you ever wondered how writers like Alice Munro or Elizabeth Strout succeed in taking ordinary landscapes with ordinary people and transforming them into sites of emotional complexity and awe? These literary feats of defamiliarization often give stories the mysterious appeal we crave as readers.
Let's look at how defamiliarization works in this passage from Elizabeth Strout's 2016 novel, I Am Lucy Barton.
"To begin with, it was a simple story: I had gone into the hospital to have my appendix out. After two days they gave me food, but I couldn't keep it down. And then a fever arrived. No one could isolate any bacteria or figure out what had gone wrong. No one ever did."
The excerpt begins with a sentence so notable for its ordinariness that the narrator herself calls it a "simple story." So what keeps us reading? Well, first, curiosity. We have temporal signifiers ("...it was," "I had gone") to tell us that this story occurred in the past, so if the narrator deems the story worthy enough to tell in the future, the story must truly be worth telling, right? We're not sure, but the narrator has succeeded in appealing to our readerly sense of reason, so we give her the benefit of the doubt. We discover that not only does she have trouble eating after the surgery, and that she develops a fever, but also that not even the doctors can figure out what went wrong. The mere fact of the doctors' confusion piques our interest -- because it runs against our expectations of what a doctor should be in this situation, which is resourceful. We think that if the doctors don't know, then the narrator is really in for it now. Then we get that last sentence/phrase": "No one ever did." A statement so wry and replete with disappointment that it's almost funny; it also gets us to consider the narrator's life beyond the hospital, her various disappointments and perhaps, the ways others have failed her or fallen short of her expectations in the past.
Looking back at this excerpt, we can see exactly how such a seemingly ordinary story consisting of no more than five sentences can cover so much ground. It juxtaposes familiarity with surprise and invites readers to feel what the narrator feels. It relegates readers to a narratively disadvantaged position by withholding information in the present about an event that occurred in the past, which leads readers to keep reading to "find out."
When you hit a wall in your writing or it begins to feel flat, consider applying a similar defamiliarization technique. What can you do to upend readerly expectations of your work in ways that feel both natural and surprising?
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