On Looking and Seeing

or a closer look at originality in creative writing

Go into your own kitchen and try to see it. Yes, see it the way the Na’vi (in the blockbuster Avatar) see and recognize everything around them.

You’ll almost certainly fail.

We have a very nice Bulgarian proverb: “He looks, but doesn’t see.” And that’s exactly what I’m going to talk to you about right here and now.

We know what a wedding, a funeral, a kiss, an argument, a mother, a stranger, a church, and a corpse in a coffin look like. All it takes is for the word to appear, and in a fraction of a second, our mind has already pulled out of the closet the ready-made set of meanings, associations, and expectations associated with it. This is extremely useful if we’re trying to survive day-to-day life without having to reinvent the spoon for breakfast every morning. For the writer, however, this convenience comes with an unpleasant side effect.

Habit causes the mind to stop seeing, and it begins merely to look.

Let’s take the sentence: “The old woman was lonely.”

There’s nothing wrong with it. On the contrary, it’s instantly understandable. Perhaps that’s precisely the problem. “Old woman” and “lonely” are such familiar concepts that the reader has no particular task to perform. They receive the information, file it away on a shelf in their mind, and the text moves on.

Now let’s consider the following: “Every evening she would set two glasses on the table. She would drink from one and wash both.”

The word “lonely” has disappeared, but this loneliness is now measured in physical weight. A ritual has emerged, and with it, a definite absence. The reader must notice the second glass on their own, understand why it is there, and imagine the person who is missing from the picture.

This is how estrangement is expressed in practice.

More than a century ago, the Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky tackled exactly this problem and built around it one of the most enduring ideas of Russian formalism, still known today. He called it “ostrannost”—an unusual word that in English is most often rendered as “defamiliarization,” “estrangement,” or, more loosely, “making strange.” In Bulgarian, the meaning is to make the familiar strange again.

Shklovsky is one of the central figures of Russian Formalism. This was a movement that emerged in Russia in the early 20th century, a time marked by the pressure of revolutions, the Futurists, artistic experiments, and the general sense that the old world was, in one way or another, falling apart. He wrote criticism, prose, and memoirs; worked in film; socialised with writers and artists; and weathered many trials and tribulations, including revolution, war, exile, and the increasingly dangerous Soviet cultural environment. The Formalists were interested not so much in what literature says as in the mechanisms that shape literature as such: structure, rhythm, language, narrative organisation, and artistic techniques. Shklovsky is one of their most prominent voices and, fortunately, one of the theorists who left behind ideas that are still genuinely useful today.

His most famous idea appears in his 1917 essay, known in translation as “Art as a Device” or “Art as Technique.” In it, Shklovsky argues that everyday life gradually becomes automated in our perception. Once we get used to something, we stop seeing it for what it really is. We recognise it, label it, and move on.

Art, according to him, has the right to sabotage this convenient mechanism.

The difference lies between knowing what the thing you’re looking at is and actually seeing it.

Shklovsky often cites Tolstoy as an example precisely because Tolstoy knows how to ignore established terminology. Instead of referring to a particular institution or action by the word through which society has already rendered it harmless, he describes what is physically happening. With this approach, a word like “punishment” can suddenly lose its respectable veneer. If we describe people who forcibly restrain another person, strip them, and strike their body, the abstraction no longer does a very good job. The event has been stripped of its linguistic packaging. And it becomes much harder to view it from a distance.

In “Holstomer,” Tolstoy employs an even more interesting device. Part of the story is presented from the perspective of a horse trying to understand the human concept of ownership (brilliant, really!). People say “my horse,” “my land,” “my house” without the slightest hesitation. For us, this construction is so commonplace that we hardly notice it. To an animal that doesn’t share this human assumption, the idea that a living creature or a piece of land can be declared “someone’s” begins to seem quite exotic.

But Tolstoy did not change the ownership of objects; rather, he shifted the point of view.

And at that moment, defamiliarization transforms from a literary theory into a very practical tool for the writer.

Shklovsky’s idea is often boiled down to the convenient formula “make the familiar strange.” But here we can easily slip up and conclude that a sufficiently strange description automatically produces art. It does not.

Here’s another illustrative example: “The kettle came to a boil.”

To make it seem strange, the sentence could be rewritten as follows:

“The lid began to tremble in uneven jerks. Long streams of steam began to emerge from the narrow spout, and inside, the water pounded against the metal walls, lifting the lid again and again.”

We don’t say that the teapot is a “metal beast whose elongated nose spews steam,” because that would replace the familiar object with a dramatic metaphor, a choice that adds no artistic value.

Through defamiliarization, we remove the ready-made label “teapot” and describe the object’s movement, sound, and physical behaviuor. We prompt the reader to notice what is actually happening; we interrupt the automatic interpretation. In this way, we prevent the reader from immediately filing the experience away under its familiar name and force them to notice and perceive it anew, with fresh eyes.

People spend decades trying to accumulate (and some quite successfully) precious metals, real estate, full bank accounts, digital assets, houses they rarely live in, and possessions they hardly ever use. Then they open a fantasy book and discover that the dragon has an unhealthy penchant for hoarding possessions and treasures.

Well, hold on a minute. Let’s flip the perspective.

These days, a dragon wouldn’t be considered unique just because it breathes fire and sleeps on piles of gold. Let’s assume that nowadays, that’s practically part of its job description. But let that same dragon become an observer of humanity’s attitude toward wealth. Suddenly, this fantastical creature isn’t some kind of monster at all. It becomes an outside observer, from whose vantage point human materialism begins to look suspiciously familiar.

Take marriage, for example. The very word conjures up a whole array of images in our minds: clothes, rings, vows, witnesses, signatures, relatives asking awkward questions, and at least two or three people who’ve decided that a wedding is the perfect time to overindulge in rakia. The reader already knows what they’re looking at, but still doesn’t see anything particularly remarkable.

But what would that same ceremony look like through the eyes of a bogeyman who has absolutely no idea what marriage is?

Place the bogeyman in the context of a human wedding. There’s no need to give it a three-page philosophical monologue—on the contrary, please don’t. It’s enough that it doesn’t understand why two people must publicly promise lifelong fidelity to one another. Why are witnesses needed? What does the government have to do with this union? Why is a document signed? Why has the whole family come to watch? And why does everyone eat wedding cake afterwards?

His bewilderment does the job better than any monologue. Suddenly, the wedding begins to resemble a complex anthropological custom. The bogeyman might decide that he would never want to get married!

The institution itself, as such, hasn’t budged a centimeter. We’ve merely shifted our perspective.

This brings us to originality—the word that periodically leads writers to believe that everything good has already been invented before them. And to some extent, they’re right. Dragons aren’t anything new. Neither are ghosts. Forbidden love has a head start of several millennia. Murder, betrayal, war, grief, coming of age, and dysfunctional families are hardly making their literary debut this year.

But why do we assume that originality must necessarily start with the theme?

Defamiliarization poses a far more useful question: Can we look at an old theme from a perspective no one has ever taken before?

Fantasy, folklore, science fiction, and horror are particularly well-suited for such creative writing exercises because these genres naturally give rise to beings that do not share our human habits. The ghost observes and sees the living. The immortal observes old age. Artificial intelligence—emotions. The monster—society’s notion of normality. The supernatural heroine can be an observer of marriage, motherhood, or sexual morality without automatically accepting the rules one grew up with.

Thus, the fantastical element ceases to be an escape from reality and becomes the magnifying glass through which we examine it.

That is why perspective is one of the most powerful tools for creating a sense of detachment that authors can use. A child, an animal, a stranger, a ghost, a god, a machine—any outside observer can notice what the person on the inside has long since stopped seeing. Not because they are smarter, but because they are not yet accustomed to what they are seeing.

It was probably this very principle that helped my short vampire story, “Eyes Wide Open,” win Strangelings’ “Written in Blood” short fiction contest. The story examines a panic attack—an experience we talk about a lot these days and for which there’s already an established vocabulary—from an unusual perspective. The problem itself is familiar. The perspective on it is not, as it twists through the eyes of a vampire.

However, this perspective is just one screwdriver in the toolbox.

We can set aside the familiar label and describe the action through its physical components. We can shift the scale and look not at the war, but at the man who mends his sock the morning before the battle. We can turn a metaphor into a literal event or place entirely ordinary behaviour in a context where it would suddenly seem absurd, cruel, or simply inexplicable.

And so we come to a minor paradox. As contemporary writers, we generally strive for prose that is smooth, clear, and easy to read—and with good reason. No one benefits from sentences that the reader has to dig through with a pickaxe. But sometimes literature needs to deliberately slow us down—to prevent us from skimming over the words out of habit, and instead force us to stop and truly see what lies before us.

Shklovsky understands exactly this.

Everyday language is effective because it allows us to understand the world quickly. And that is precisely why it often renders it invisible.

Literary language can slow down perception through rhythm, unusual syntax, unexpected imagery, a shifted chronology, or a point of view that prevents everything from being grasped on the very first line. The reader lingers on the object for one second longer. Sometimes that one second does all the work we’ve been striving for.

Of course, it’s possible to overdo it here as well.

There’s absolutely no need for every kitchen spoon to be described through the eyes of an alien zoologist who has just discovered cutlery in a human home. If every door, sock, pitcher, and bus stop demands a philosophical reexamination, by page five the reader will be ready to kill someone just to read a normal sentence like “He opened the door.”

Defamiliarization works where familiarity has already become a problem.

I’m sure you’re now asking yourself, “How can I describe this or that in a different way?” This question all too easily leads to another problem—ornamentation—yet another metaphor, yet another comparison, sprinkling a little more glitter on the sentence.

To write more effectively, I think it’s more useful to ask ourselves, “Where might the reader recognise something so quickly that they don’t have time to experience it?”

A death scene can contain all the standard trappings of grief and yet remain lifeless to the reader on the page. A wedding can be just another wedding. The first kiss can be a composite of all the first kisses we’ve ever read about. The sentence “She loved him” may convey perfectly accurate information and yet evoke almost nothing in the reader.

This is our job. This is the problem we must work on.

A simple exercise illustrates the mechanism at work remarkably well. Take an ordinary object—a door, for example—and try to describe it without using the words “door,” “handle,” “hinge,” “open,” “close,” or “room.”

Suddenly, what you thought you knew so well begins to resist. You’re forced to notice its weight, its movement, its sound, the way it separates one space from another, and the fact that the human body must perform a specific sequence of movements to pass through it.

It turns out that the noun “door” has been doing quite a bit of overtime up until now.

Then try the same thing with a funeral. Or jealousy. Motherhood. Betrayal.

That makes the exercise less fun and not so easy.

And this is important because Shklovsky’s idea goes beyond a technique for writing unusual prose. It concerns the way in which habit influences human experience. Repetition makes the world more bearable and easier to inhabit, but at the same time erases parts of it. We stop seeing an object once we learn its name. We stop noticing a gesture once we’ve repeated it enough times. We stop asking questions about a tradition because everyone around us has also stopped doing so.

Art is a mischievous thing; it misbehaves and can interrupt the process of perception.

It can remove the name. It can change the observer. It can slow down the moment. It can present our world to a being that doesn’t know its rules and therefore has the audacity to ask why we follow them at all.

And in that moment, for a few seconds, the familiar reappears before our eyes. We see it.

I think this is precisely where one of the most fruitful paths to originality intersects. No one is forcing us to discover new continents or uncharted lands every time.

To be honest, the chances are slim, and the literary map is already quite full and marked up. But we can take something that millions of people have seen, experienced, or described, and find a vantage point that no one has ever stood at before.

The subject may be old, overused, and a bit rusty around the edges. But the perspective has no such excuse.

Will you give it a try?

©Elissa Hess, 2026

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