Juxtaposition

I was on the Tube this morning and sitting opposite me was a young girl wearing a hijab and reading a trashy mag called Reveal. She made a striking picture, muffled in black, with the title of the magazine blaring out from her lap. The contradiction she presented seemed kind of ironic and it struck me that juxtapositions like this can be meat and drink for the fiction writer. It was a quick cultural snapshot that begged so many questions, suggested so many different influences at play and I think as an image it could have made the start of a story, or certainly an exercise in characterisation.

It got me thinking that you can certainly use juxtaposition to highlight a point that you are trying to put across in your narrative.  Something incongruous is immediately interesting; you can use it to create tension or to shed new light. As human beings, we are a mass of contradictions, that's what makes us interesting; that's what makes writing about people so fascinating, and reading about them too...