On Repetition

In fiction writing, repetition – of character, plot and language – is both the most natural and the most maddening of habits to slip into. On the one hand, it’s inevitable (and heartening) that as your style develops, you’ll pick up certain idiosyncracies that will mark it out as unequivocally yours, and repetition is a big part of that. “Oh yes, so-and-so writes such wonderfully dark and bitter female leads” is, on the face of it, a compliment, rather than criticism of the author’s lack of internal originality. Likewise, “I dig how her love stories never have happy endings”, or even “he really knows how to use the word ‘cunt’ to great effect.” When we talk of someone’s writing having hallmarks, or identifiable and distinctive features, we’re essentially talking about effective use of repetition to build a pattern.

On the other hand, nothing gives me fits when I write quite so much as finding a casually, clumsily repeated word somewhere, or realising that I’ve used a particular expression three times in the same story. It bothers me to the point that I get an actual flush of shame if I spot it – or, worse, someone else points it out – after I’ve published something online. I constantly worry about just re-writing the same scenarios or the same characters, and was recently horrified to re-read a couple of old stories and discover that my closing line was almost identical in each.

All of which is a long-ass way of saying that repetition is an instinctive part of writing that most of us have to closely manage in order for it to have a positive effect on our work. The problem is that it’s also often subconscious. I was reminded of that today, when I got an email from one of my friends. She’s known for a while that I write erotica (though not that I post it online or blog about sex), and has been bugging me to let her read it. Last week I cracked, and sent her four relatively carefully-chosen pieces from the last year or so. This morning she replied with her thoughts on what she’d read, which included this observation:

“I noticed the way that three of the women have jaws that jut – a description that stood out for me because I’d only ever think to use it if I was wanting to depict someone as unattractively obstinate or belligerent, but for you it perhaps seems to be a sexy manifestation of will?”

I was sufficiently bowled over both by the fact that I’d described three different characters in that way, and by her interpretation of it, that I actually stopped halfway across the railway bridge I was crossing at the time to let it sink in. This is not a friend who I ever really talk to about my love life, but I realised very quickly that just by joining the dots across three short stories – by spotting the repetition – she’d formed an incredibly accurate insight into one of the main things I find attractive in a woman. The repetition was unintentional, and until her email I was unaware it existed – if I’d noticed it while writing those stories, I’d almost certainly have removed it – but by virtue of that it ultimately told me something about myself that I might not otherwise have given conscious consideration.

As it is, the choice of imagery makes perfect sense when I think about it. I’ve always sort of shrugged my shoulders when asked whether I have a physical type. My ex-girlfriends, and the women I’ve dated for any length of time, are a mix of the tall and the short, the curvy and the skinny, the fair and the dark, and the profile becomes even more varied when extending the sample to people I’ve seen more casually. If I plotted them on a graph, a tenuous pattern might emerge, with a slight skew towards the tall, the dark-haired, and the curvy, but with enough outliers across each axis to make it shaky at best.

Instead, I’ve typically tried to answer by pointing to other characteristics. “I’m attracted to women who are active rather than passive,” I’ll say, or “I tend to fancy women who aren’t afraid to stand up for themselves, or to ask for what they want.” Ambition, appetite, intelligence, drive, determination – all words I have used in response to the question, and all qualities perhaps embodied in one form or another by that defiant jut of the jaw in the female characters I write.

Repetition can tell us something about the authors we read, but in our own writing it can also add to the way we understand ourselves. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to obsessively check that I haven’t re-used the word ‘subconscious’ at any point in this post…