Is this actually good writing advice? To what extent does repetition bother you? Would you be upset if a sentence contained a lot of the same prepositions, words that start with the same letter, verbs in the progressive tense, etc. Where do you draw the line between repetition and utility?
most my books are water damaged because whenever I see a word repeated then I am inconsolable and cry and cry and cry. I never finished a book
>>23326351What terrible advice. There's nothing wrong with well-constructed repetition; elegant variation is unnecessary at best & distracting at worsthttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elegant_variation
like every other piece of faggy writing pseudoadvice, it's actually "avoid repetition when it's bad, use repetition when it's good," and to tell one from the other you need to have a good ear. so the advice is actually "just be good at writing."
>>23326351whats even funnier than repetative writers, writers you can instantly tell use this list. The correct way to avoid repetition, is just not write those fucking parts in the first place. its a book, not a movie script, youre not directing stunt men, the reader doesnt need to know exactly whats happening on a second-to-second basis, thats what imagination is for
>>23326406>t. bad writer
>>23326408>t. YA novel reader
>>23326418I am not going to deny that, but have you written anything better? You are worse than YA writers.
some authors are good at repetition. When Jon Fosse does it then everyone recognises the poetry behind it. and it elevates the text
>>23326429I have in fact, not like I would convince you. Ive been doing it for 24 years, and out of everything I ever learned, theres only like 3 rules to writing that actually matter. And modern writers somehow manage to dodfe every one
>>23326441All talk no show.
>>23326351This is awful advice. Changing "Jack walked to school," to "Jack sauntered to school," does not somehow make you a better writer. Also, avoiding the word "said" like it's a single mother in her 30s with a mulatto child doesnt make you a better writer either. Will carefully selecting your words and avoiding cliches make you a better writer? Yes. Will a thesaurus? No.
>>23326406>its a book, not a movie script, youre not directing stunt menyou've clearly never looked at a movie script beforethey're notorious for clipping things and leaving a lot of details out (that's what the director is for) your script will get tossed in the bin if it's too wordy and descriptive
>>23326452well of course I wont post anything. What would it achieve, impressing some rando who doesnt give a shit? It wouldnt matter anyway, you read YA books. you couldnt tell good writing if it walked up and dicked you in the mouth.
>>23326351Sometimes repetition is bad, sometimes it's OK, sometimes you do it deliberately. It certainly can’t be covered by half-a-dozen Dos and Don’ts written in a friendly font & cheery colour scheme like something on a kindergarten wall.If you ask for rules you'll hear phrases like "you need to develop a good ear". That's not much better than "just write well, dude". Also it's a bit disingenuous. I think there *are* rules; it's just that they're complicated and subtle. But trying to learn the rules and then apply them is doing it backwards. The best way to “learn” them is to talk to articulate people and read lots and lots of good writing. (And of course do this when it matters, i.e. between the ages of 2 and 16.) Then you'll be correctly programmed. Your brain will know the rules even if you don't.But anyway, FWIW, a few random thoughts:— The more common a word, the more you can repeat it. No-one's going to get tired of "and" or "the" or "said" unless you really push it (Cormac McCarthy pushes it). "Luscious", "imperturbable", "serene" are another matter. The Pareto Distribution is a deep feature of the universe and your reader knows this (even if he doesn't know he knows it). Flouting it is a serious matter.— Using the same word twice can sound inefficient. It's like writing computer code. If you calculate (sin x) ^ 2 + (cos y) ^ 2 twice in a loop, your game will run at 11 fps. You need to organize things so you only do the maths once (you might store the result in a register). The equivalent in literature is to arrange the prose so the structure implies the repetition, or facilitates the use of a simple synonym. (It's possible to go too far with this. Gibbon, for example, had an absolute fetish for ‘efficient’ parallel clauses, but they're a nightmare to parse. More often than not you have to wait until the end to see how the sentence fits together, and then go back and read it again. The cure is worse than the disease.)— A key word used at a climax should be fresh. Rewrite any Shakespeare speech to include such a word at the beginning & you'll usually find you've taken all the punch out of it. (This rule is surprisingly strong. It's even stronger in music. A full close in C major won't mean a thing if you had a G - C progression three bars earlier.)— It's no good just hitting the thesaurus for "elegant variation" (as per your picture). You can get away with it a little bit, but more than that & the reader will recognize you’re only using the different words to avoid repetition. The variation needs to feel *justified*. Don't just substitute synonym A. Instead, come at the thing from a different angle, or describe a different facet of it. (Good writers typically avoid laborious general description. They much prefer to imply the whole through a single sharp detail. So "just write well, dude" will fix most problems here automatically.)
>>23326351This is for pseuds who use more technical words to describe simple actions. It convoludes the text. >>23326406 is right that you don't have to describe everything with miniscule details except when necessary.
>>23326930This is excellent advice. Are there any books I can read or things I can do (targeted exercises for example) as a starting point to write better?
>>23326351This is junk that high school teachers use to make kids write more "descriptively" but all it results in is incomprehensible purple prose with zero talent.
