How Tolstoy Can Dramatically Improve Your Writing With One Russian Word

Russian Orthodox hate him: this count found a simple trick to take your writing to the next level.

Lev, or Leo Tolstoy. Maybe you’ve heard of him.

With his bestsellers Bared Shoulders and Soirées for 900 Pages and The Girl under the Train, he won some modest critical acclaim. Including the obscure title of Best Writer Ever.

He also happens to be one of my favorite authors. Which is why the following piece of advice is especially dear to me. Not in the least because of the instant and profound impact it will have on your writing — whether that’s blogs or stories or anything else.

So, what is this simple trick Tolstoy used in his writing to captivate millions of readers for over a century?

The magic word is Ostranenie.

There you have it. Now go and write some wonderful stuff!

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Just kidding. I will explain:

Ostranenie is a Russian word. The meaning of which is something along the lines of estrangement or ‘the art of making strange’.

It was a key term among the Russian avant-garde artists of the early 20th century. The formalist Viktor Shklovsky, in his 1907 essay “Art as Technique”, found Tolstoy to be one of the most efficient users of ostranenie ever.

What’s more, Viktor argued that ostranenie was actually the key to Tolstoy’s phenomenal success as a writer.

So how does ostrannenie, or estrangement, work exactly? And how can you apply it to your own writing?

First we have to learn about the opposite of ostranenie: habituzation.

When you are familiar with an object, a concept or even a literary trope, then your mind will skip over it — you take in only the cue that is offered without paying attention to the whole. Your mind simply tunes out and doesn’t pay attention to the details anymore. This is known as habituzation.

This is exactly what happens when you read an article of writing tips that you’ve seen a million times before. You see that first cliché and you simply zone out. You gloss over the words but they don’t really enter your consciousness. They don’t fire your emotions. Let alone inspire you.

It’s not just cookie-cutter blog posts however. This process also happens in our spoken language. By it’s very nature you don’t notice it, but when we are conversing in a language that we feel comfortable with, we often don’t finish words or sentences. Yet we still understand what we are saying to each other. We are so familiar with the language that we don’t have to pay attention to the details to make sense of it. All we need is a cue. The initial sound of a word. Half of a sentence.

Habit forming happens when something has become routine. Whether that’s reading cliche blog posts, gossiping with a friend in a familiar language, or doing the dishes for the millionth time.

Sure, habits make things easy. Habits uphold your comfort-zone. But habits never make you experience anything new. And habits rarely fire your emotions.

Habits predominantly make things boring.

When your mind blinds itself to the details, it blinds itself to the experience. When something becomes habituated you won’t learn or experience joy from it anymore. Habit forming may even waste more of our precious time than we are willing to admit.

Tolstoy himself provides the following example of the dulling effects of habit forming

I was cleaning and, meandering about, approached the divan and couldn’t remember whether or not I had dusted it. Since these movements are habitual and unconscious I could not remember and felt that it was impossible to remember — so that if I had dusted it and forgot — that is, had acted unconsciously, then it was the same as if I had not. If some conscious person had been watching, then the fact could be established. If, however, no one was looking, or looking on unconsciously, if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been.

Tolstoy was busy cleaning a room. But when he walked up to dust off his divan he had forgotten whether he’d already cleaned it or not. He realized that if he had dusted it and forgot, then it’d be like he had never dusted it at all. A big waste of time. Leave it to the Russian master of drama to make this trivial act a terrifying metaphor of wasted human lives, but the example is clear: when you do something unconsciously, you have wasted the experience.

This is where ostranenie comes in

Ostranenie aims to break you out of your habit and forces you to pay real attention to what you are reading. No matter how trivial or common the content is.

Ostranenie makes even the most trodden and dull scene an exciting, fresh experience that you want to pay conscious attention to. It ignites your mind and your emotions and engages you fully to the words on the page as if they were the first words you ever read.

Ostranenie snaps you out of your habituated duldrum and activates your mind and your senses. It makes you process what it truly is that you are doing, hearing or reading.

When your partner suddenly starts performing handstands and scat-rapping during an otherwise boring work story, best believe you are going to pay attention.

So how can you apply ostranenie — the ‘art of making strange’ — to your writing?

As the translation implies, you simply turn the common into something strange. You present the known as if it were something new.

Tolstoy already used this technique back in 1848 when he was still Heath Ledger.

For example, if I make you read the word ‘chair’ then you immediately conjure up a picture of a chair in your mind. The word does not significantly register at all, except for providing you with a cue to place a chair in the scene. Any chair.

If, however, my goal is to make you consciously think about a specific chair, to really make you experience the chair, then I would use ostranenie and make the chair seem like a strange object that you’re approaching for the very first time:

You see four round pieces of wood. They are about a foot in height, dark and coarse and placed at about two feet from one another. If you’d draw lines between them, you would make a square shape. On top of these wooden cylinders rests an equally dark wooden plate of sorts. It is concave, like a shallow puddle. Mounted on the back — or the front — of this plate is a long wooden board. You realize the board is about the length of a man’s back, and that if you were to sit on the plate the board would support your body nicely, allowing for a good rest.

Of course there would rarely ever be a reason to describe a chair in this manner, but it exemplifies the idea of making something strange by not naming the object but describing it through unfamiliar eyes instead.

Tolstoy employed this technique to great effect whenever he wanted his readers to see something from a fresh perspective.

Take for example his description of the act of flogging. Tolstoy wanted to show his readers how cruel, strange and barbaric this very common act of discipline really was. And so he described the act in detail without actually using the word ‘flogging’:

To strip people who have broken the law, to hurl them to the floor. To rap on their bottoms with switches. To lash about on the naked buttocks. Just why precisely this stupid, savage means of causing pain and not any other — why not prick the shoulders or any part of the body with needles, squeeze the hands or the feet in a vise, or anything like that?

Here Tolstoy shows that just because ‘flogging’ is a common word and concept, it doesn’t mean that the act isn’t actually just as savage as any other means of causing pain to a body.

In another example Tolstoy wants to make clear to his reader just how weird the concept of private property really is. And to achieve this he employs ostranenie. In order to make the concept strange, he has the story narrated by a horse instead of a human:

I understood well what they said about whipping and Christianity. But then I was absolutely in the dark. What’s the meaning of “his own,” “his colt”? From these phrases I saw that people thought there was some sort of connection between me and the stable. At the time I simply could not understand the connection. Only much later, when they separated me from the other horses, did I begin to understand. But even then I simply could not see what it meant when they called me “man’s property.” The words “my horse” referred to me, a living horse, and seemed as strange to me as the words “my land,” “my air,” “my water.”

With a horse as a narrator, the reader is forced to view the events and concepts of the story trough the horses eyes. This allows for an unfamiliar perspective on otherwise known and habituated ideas about ownership.

So what can we learn from Tolstoy and his use of ostranenie?

When something is important for you to tell, don’t settle for common ways of telling it. Don’t use habituated and cliche words and sentences. Instead, tell it from a novel perspective.

Use descriptions instead of words, like Tolstoy’s description of flogging. Or tell the story from an alien perspective, like Tolstoy did when using a horse as the narrator.

Say you’re writing a blog about productivity and you want to open it with an anecdote about how much time you wasted writing nonsense because you just weren’t inspired at all. Don’t simply say ‘I spend hours writing nonsense yesterday’. Instead describe the process. Write something like:

I tapped away on the little plastic buttons, producing a cavalcade of rattling until my fingertips hurt. The letters I pressed reappeared on the screen to form supposed units of meaning. But they meant little to me.

And when you’re writing a story about workplace politics, why not have it narrated by a young child and situate it on the playground of an elementary school? (Lord of the Flies is a brilliant example of ostranenie!)

Habituated words, concepts and narratives serve their purpose. And foregoing them all together and filling your blog or story with ostranenie will turn it into an unreadable mess that will only make a handful of absurdists happy.

Instead, employ ostranenie when you really want to emphasize a point or an experience. When you believe that a fresh gaze is needed to really drive your message home.

I personally strive for the ‘cookie-dough rule’:

I try to maintain a balance between vanilla ice cream (the whole text) and chunks of ostranenie (cookie-dough). Vanilla ice cream bores me after a few bites and spoons full of just cookie-dough quickly make me feel a bit sick. In literary terms Tolstoy strikes an impressive ‘Ben and Jerry’s’ on the cookie-dough scale. And you just can’t go wrong with that.

(This article is the first in a series I will do on writing and productivity tips that you may not know of, but which are guaranteed to take your writing to the next level. I am writing this series as an answer to a post I made last week.)

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