Words on Repeat
He opened the refrigerator door. He grabbed a beer, then strolled to the living room and plunked down on the sofa. He picked up the remote and turned on the game. He farted. He decided life as a single man was pretty good…
What’s wrong with the previous paragraph?
If you said, “He didn’t close the refrigerator,” congratulations! That’s exactly right! Just think of all that cold air escaping into the house, raising the electric bill and allowing food to spoil…
Okay, okay, I’ll take off my dad hat and put on my writer hat.
Every sentence in that paragraph started with the same word.
Why is that bad?
Because I say so, that’s why!
Sorry, don’t know how I ended up wearing the dad hat again…
Building good prose requires variety to help control the pace and flow of your story. Part of it’s a brain thing: if a reader starts a new sentence with the same word too many times in a row, it tends to bore them and make them lose focus on what they’re reading.
It’s part of why your teacher making you write lines was such a dreadful punishment. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard, it just got boring as hell writing the same thing over and over and over and…
You get the point.
Good prose is born from the way we tell stories, the way we speak. When we tell stories, our words are naturally varied—usually the only times we see someone repeating a word over and over is when they’re new to storytelling or using it to make a point.
It should be the same when we write. Though there are slightly different conventions for putting words on paper instead of saying them out loud, when a reader sees the words, they speak them in their mind, bringing them off the page and to life. Our writing should be as rich as a storyteller’s words, and part of doing that is not repeating the same words to start sentences (or even paragraphs) unless we’re doing it for a reason.
So going back to my example at the beginning, let’s see if we can add some life to it:
Tim opened the refrigerator. One beer left. Shit. It was John’s turn to buy more, and he never did it fast enough for Tim’s liking.
Grabbing the beer, he took out his frustration on the fridge door, slamming it shut and hearing the rattle and clank of jars inside. Popping the top, he strolled to the living room and plopped down on the couch.
Where was the remote?
He stood, looking around, finally seeing it on the floor next to John’s chair. Picking it up, he turned on the TV as he sat back down. The Braves were beating the Dodgers 13-2, improving Tim’s mood…
What’s wrong with the previous paragraph?
If you said, “He didn’t close the refrigerator,” congratulations! That’s exactly right! Just think of all that cold air escaping into the house, raising the electric bill and allowing food to spoil…
Okay, okay, I’ll take off my dad hat and put on my writer hat.
Every sentence in that paragraph started with the same word.
Why is that bad?
Because I say so, that’s why!
Sorry, don’t know how I ended up wearing the dad hat again…
Building good prose requires variety to help control the pace and flow of your story. Part of it’s a brain thing: if a reader starts a new sentence with the same word too many times in a row, it tends to bore them and make them lose focus on what they’re reading.
It’s part of why your teacher making you write lines was such a dreadful punishment. It wasn’t that it was particularly hard, it just got boring as hell writing the same thing over and over and over and…
You get the point.
Good prose is born from the way we tell stories, the way we speak. When we tell stories, our words are naturally varied—usually the only times we see someone repeating a word over and over is when they’re new to storytelling or using it to make a point.
It should be the same when we write. Though there are slightly different conventions for putting words on paper instead of saying them out loud, when a reader sees the words, they speak them in their mind, bringing them off the page and to life. Our writing should be as rich as a storyteller’s words, and part of doing that is not repeating the same words to start sentences (or even paragraphs) unless we’re doing it for a reason.
So going back to my example at the beginning, let’s see if we can add some life to it:
Tim opened the refrigerator. One beer left. Shit. It was John’s turn to buy more, and he never did it fast enough for Tim’s liking.
Grabbing the beer, he took out his frustration on the fridge door, slamming it shut and hearing the rattle and clank of jars inside. Popping the top, he strolled to the living room and plopped down on the couch.
Where was the remote?
He stood, looking around, finally seeing it on the floor next to John’s chair. Picking it up, he turned on the TV as he sat back down. The Braves were beating the Dodgers 13-2, improving Tim’s mood…