Monday, May 14, 2012
The Art of Writing No. 38
Repetition is the bane of the author. There
is a high incidence of the repetition of a word or phrase within a single
paragraph, never mind chapter!
Consequently there are many writers who sit
with a thesaurus by their computer or notebook. Not many of us have a
labyrinthine vocabulary and having at hand a resource which provides synonyms
can help us produce a much more involving and entertaining text. (There are
free ones on the internet).The issue for the writer is that the more intensely
you operate in the ‘zone’, with words spewing from your tommy-gun-like-brain on
to the paper - for there seems to be nothing inside your head to impede their
progress - the more clichéd your writing becomes. Arrestingly innovative sentences
help make a book. Using alternative words and phrases gee us up because they create
hooks for our imaginations, momentarily, by stimulating our pleasure in the new
and fresh. You have to be a very great writer indeed to write in a fever of
concentration and still maintain originality and freshness in your choice of
words. I remember reading Dan Brown’s The
Da Vinci Code and twice, maybe three times he talked of the hero ‘gunning’
his car away from some scene or the other. I felt short-changed. His writing is
never more than adequate. The better the writer, the more he or she tries to
avoid repetition of a word, be it noun, verb or adjective. I remember seeing a
rather fine film set in my home city of Newcastle, called Get Carter. An excellent phrase was used by either a gangster or
Caine, I can’t remember which, but whoever it was described the eyes in
someone’s face as piss holes in the snow. Then I happened to see a B movie some
couple of years later and there was another gangster using the same phrase, attesting
to its B movie status. The same
happens with novels. It is careless and lazy to plagiarise from other sources,
as well as being an act of thievery against a fellow professional. It is also
careless and lazy to plagiarise from your own novel, either a previous work or
the one you are currently writing! Remember, plagiarism can be unconscious – the
mere duplicating of words and phrases you have used already.
Essentially, most repetition within your
work breeds banality and a lifeless prose. Avoid it.
Having said all that, when my editor read
the first draft of Azimuth Book 1,
she said she could not remember who some of the characters were because I did
not repeat the ‘handles’ which enable the reader to follow characters through
the plot. Instead, I had resorted
to a variety of synonyms when describing them. I learned that repetition might actually
be necessary. The cast of characters in Azimuth
runs into the hundreds and since for most of the inner narrative there are no
names to distinguish individuals, I had focused on making my prose rich and
diverse, offering different adjectives to describe a character every time he or
she turned up, thereby confusing the reader. Using the same noun and adjective
to re-introduce a character helped. The ‘fat boy’ is always reintroduced at his
next entrance as the ‘fat boy’, not the plump boy, the rotund boy, the obese
boy…. It is the same when introducing characters’ appearances. Try to give a
unique visual profile to every one of them so that there can be no confusion.
This extends to names. Don’t even include names beginning with the same first
letter. Books are made from words, not visual images. Generally we can
differentiate people easily in films and on TV by their features alone but in
books we have to be sure we are including enough detail to make a character
unique.
Through
a Mirror Clear: a Gothic Love Story by Eric le
Sange on Kindle Amazon
Azimuth
by Jack Sanger, in three separate volumes on Kindle
Amazon
Azimuth, the trilogy, in beautifully produced paperback (and PDF)
www.azmuthtrilogy.com
The Strange Attractor by Eric le Sange Kindle, Amazon
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