Abstract

Creative writers often engage readers by constructing emotive narratives that convey a sense of wonder and/or heterotopic awe. However, successfully evoking heterotopia, or a sense of “otherness,” though writing can be challenging, especially when our appreciation of and fondness for commonplace experiences and objects inevitably wanes over time and space. This diminishing curiosity for the unexceptional has implications for writers across most genres. As such, this emerging research seeks to assist writers who are invested in crafting narratives that imbue a sense of heterotopic wonder. By adopting a multidisciplinary perspective that explores theories and schemas from disciplines including psychology, critical theory, philosophy, and literary theory, this article suggests ways in which practitioners might reimagine everyday objects and their interaction with those objects. The discussion proposes writing strategies that may inform creative practice, foreground selected texts, and help practitioners to engage with a newly imbued sense of wonder through the reinterpretation of the “everyday.” This article is particularly relevant for writers with works in progress, and authors invested in Young Adult fiction (YA) and/or fiction that explores heterotopias as otherness.