Evaluating Repetition
Remember how I was repeating myself?
Remember how I was doing the exercises from Ursula K. Le Guin’s Steering the Craft?
Remember how I said I would evaluate the repetition exercises on December 8?
Remember how I’m the Prince of Lies?
Yeah, well.
At first I was feeling rather negative about a lot of these repetition exercises.
Version 1, the bit that repeats “book” several times, was fine, but not terribly interesting. I think Le Guin is certainly correct that a little verbal repetition like this is valuable, but as an exercise it’s not all that exciting. You need a broader context, an actual narrative in which you manipulate such repetition to create an effect. Still, it’s worth doing, because it reminds you not to be slavish about deleting repeated words, particularly when that prompts you to dig out the thesaurus and choose odd vocabulary.
Version 2, Phil and Joan’s mirror scene, I didn’t like at all. The technique is straightforward enough in itself, but it’s also extremely mechanical. My approach was to write a reasonably complex sentence, something that has a distinct rhythm, and then rough out an approximate parallel. Each time I needed a tricky word, I’d write something like 3noun (=noun with 3 syllables) and go on. Sometimes that would have me painted into a corner, and I’d make the second sentence bit clean and reconstruct the parallel bit in the first. Eventually I had more or less enough bits and copy-pasted them into a narrative order.
Le Guin remarks that this “is not a technique to use in story-writing; it’s an exercise in awareness.” Reading that made me feel a lot better about it. It’s kind of fun, in a weird way, but there’s something very unsatisfying about it. I find myself deeply uncertain about where I might use a rhythmic or syntactic repetition in actual fiction-writing. That said, I think what Le Guin means about “awareness” is that doing the exercise helps make one aware of such echoes when they’re not deliberate, such that it becomes a conscious decision whether to revise or to make use of the echo.
Version 3, the ghost story, was a lot of fun. It took quite a while to decide what the echoing event would be, and in fact the original idea was different. I thought Albin would tread on the cat, and then in the house there’d be something similar (probably a cat or mouse), and then there’d be another similar event, and finally there’d be an actual haunting. I wrote pretty much straight through, and found that my semi-random choice of the name “Albin” created a new dynamic: the Frenchman who finds the English intensely irritating. And somehow, given that dynamic, it became clear to me that the point of the story would be to have him repeat the feline encounter again and again, until he just can’t take it any more. The final story is no masterpiece, but I’d kind of like to come back to it in a few months and polish it up, possibly after rereading a pile of M.R. James to ensure I’ve got the style down pat.
So what do I have to say about repetition in general, and what I learned from the exercises? Let’s see what Le Guin suggests as far as things to think about in evaluation after the fact:
Were you comfortable at first with the idea of deliberately repeating words and constructions and events? Did you get more comfortable with it doing it? Did the exercise bring out any particular feeling-tone or subject matter or style in your work, and can you say what it was? (STC 58)
Was I initially comfortable? Sure. I’m not dogmatic about repetition, just as I’m not dogmatic about short sentences, or adverb-deletion, or whatever. My problem was that I didn’t really see a clear way to go about it with individual words, and when it came to constructions I found it awkward and somewhat pointless. As for events, I saw immediately what the point was, but it took quite a while to figure out how to do it without writing a novella.
Did I get more comfortable? I suppose so, certainly with words and events. I think Le Guin is imagining that I’m going to have a voice in my head going, “No! Stop! That’s repetitive! It’s evil!” I don’t have that voice, particularly—I’ve been editing and teaching academic prose far too long for that—so this question doesn’t exactly apply to me.
As to the final question, however, I think this kind of thing brought out a tendency to be somewhat mannered in my style. That is to say, it feels very deliberate and artificial, and not entirely in a good way. This is especially true with the second exercise. On the other hand, whereas a mannered style is usually considered a bad thing, I think it can work fine if you’re deliberately emulating another style—particularly one that feels a bit mannered to most readers today. That’s why the ghost story thing works: I don’t think M.R. James is an especially mannered writer, but when I’ve taught his stories, students often find him rather stilted and artificial. The same is even more true with Saki, whom students often find almost prissily affected and whom I find beautifully elegant and graceful.
More generally, then, I do have some inclination to overthink, to be hyper-controlled in my constructions, and this can sometimes feel mannered. If I’ve gained something significant from this exercise, it’s really the beginnings of an awareness of the difference between controlled and mannered. In other words, as long as I’m trying (through these exercises, for example) to become more aware of what I’m doing, I need also to increase my awareness of when that spills over and makes my prose seem affected or fake. I’m not sure this is really what Le Guin had in mind with these exercises, but I think she would be pleased nevertheless: she’s all about getting writers to be more conscious of what they’re doing.
Next time, I move on to Chapter 5: Adjective and Adverb.
Thanks for reading!