Tuesday, February 16, 2021

Catching Repetition

One of the toughest things to keep straight as a writer is to remember what you’ve already talked about.  We often get so eager to tell the reader what is going on that we sometimes forget we already told them.  Remember, none of us sit down and write the entire book, or usually even an entire chapter, in one sitting.  Because of that, I often have to sit down for a few minutes and re-read what I’d written the previous day to get back into the flow.

I noticed this while reading A Call To Arms.  It’s a fun book about a galactic war in which humanity is pulled due to its ferocity.  However, the plot is not what I want to go over here – it’s the fact that as I read certain parts of it, I noticed that there were some parts that rehashed something the author already went into, sometimes word for word.

It gets a little jarring when that happens as I think, didn’t he already tell me all of that?  I have to push through it and get back into new material.  Yet it also made me smile as I recognized myself in such errors, for I’ve done that a few times and had to go back and fix it.  What it tells me is that a) he didn’t re-read it after writing it, and b) the editor was likely a lowly intern editor, or maybe that there were several editors who only looked at certain parts, and they didn’t catch it.  It speaks of laziness, even if the story was cool.

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