Repeating Yourself… Repeating Yourself

I just finished the very talented Jodi Picoult’s Nineteen Minutes and certain elements of it reminded me of her book The Pact. And that got me thinking: As a writer, how do you not repeat yourself?

2007

1998

By this, I mean, how do you ensure that you don’t use the same phrase or comparison or even the same word or situation or character trait over again? How do you catch yourself? (For me, critique partners are McAwesomely Awesome at helping me see this sort of thing.) But after you have written a bazillion stories, how do you catch yourself–particularly stories that have been edited eight hundred times and you no longer can recall what actually stayed in the story and what went into the ‘reuse if possible’ pile?

The reason I bring this up is that in these two Picoult books when she flashes back to the moms being expectant, they both took long walks, right up to their due dates, and in both books the husbands make cracks about the wife giving birth out on her walk. As well, I noticed the use of a strange and rare word in a comparison twice (dang if I can recall it now though!) in Nineteen Minutes. This is something I know I do sometimes. Reusing a strange and wonderful word is so easy to do. You generally don’t think about that kind of thing as you are writing along. Also, I found that in both books the female teen characters both end up pregnant, and both feel less than perfect, but both put on the perfect facade in hopes that nobody will notice that they don’t quite fit and aren’t quite real.

Picoult has published 18 bestselling novels which is no small feat. So how do you keep it fresh in each story? How do you not fall into your own little groove? And can you? Is some repetition to be expected? I really don’t know, but it’s something I’m thinking about this week. That is, when I’m not changing killer poppy diapers.