Awaken Your Memoir By Making It Strange

“Old Glory” — Barry Blitt, 2022

Let’s say that you have conquered writer’s block as an aspiring memoirist using my timeline tool, and you now have a notebook brimming with potential scenes. 

You may be ready to create a map of your story, identifying a conflict or set of questions you hope to resolve, the major turning point in that arc, and some pivotal scenes in the middle that will keep you on track as you write toward that climax. 

Or maybe you just want to write into some of those scenes and see what you discover. 

Either way, you will find today’s tool useful. 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.

The remaining two sections show examples of defamiliarization in cartoons and film. I also include 4 exercises that are certain to transform your scenes and characters.