It’s my day off from child care, and friends, I’ve just spent nine straight hours taking my final pass through this manuscript to sand away the infelicitous repetition of key words (some of which you’ll find in the subject line above).
Repetition in prose is a complex subject.
Often we notice repetition as a negative. I imagine most of us have been struck by an author’s utterly brilliant, on point, fascinating, strange use of an edge case word—maybe we had to look the word up, maybe we didn’t, but we’d never in twenty years think about writing that, there. And then the author used it again, maybe four hundred pages later, in a similar way—and we remembered. I’m (slowly) reading Gaddis’ phonebook The Recognitions at the moment. There’s a wonderful line which I am about to butcher, in which he describes a certain kind of clumsy chivalry or faux-gentlemanliness as a ‘refuge of insipience’, yes, with an ‘s,’ an archaic word, meaning foolishness, that my autocorrect has tried five times now to replace with ‘incipience.’ So much for that. Anyway, trust me on this, it was a great line, I laughed a cold laugh, and if I hadn’t just spent nine hours glaring at a manuscript I’d go hunt the line down to find it for you. And, if at some point in the back six hundred pages of this brick of a book, or anywhere in J.R., Gaddis uses that word again, I’ll notice.
Heck, I bet some of you have had this experience with one of my books! Please take this as your permission not to tell me. We’re all mortal, and we try our best.
We notice repetition as a negative. But some words do not just repeat as tics, or not merely as tics. What is a book, but a constellation of words? Each time a word is used, it accumulates new meaning from its context, and lends the meanings it has accumulated—in your particular text, and in others—to the sentence. In this way languages can be ennobled or (for a time, at least) poisoned—if you’re an American, do you feel the same way about the word ‘great’ that you did six years ago? If you’re a particular kind of nerd, when I began that sentence just now with ‘What is a book,” did you hear it followed by “a miserable little pile of secrets”?
Within a text, repeated words draw connections. What sorts of things in this book are ghosts? Is this car a ghost? This memory? Is the white of her hat a ghostlike white? “The ghost of a smile?” Fantasy and science fiction prose worldbuilding sings—or, to be honest, works at all—by loading vocabulary in this way: ’uplift’ in Brin, ‘Guardian’ in Jemisin (or the beautiful side-loading of ‘suss’ into the invented sensory verb ‘sess’), iris in Heinlein’s off-referenced ‘the door irised open.’ McKillip’s ‘riddles’ and ‘beasts’ are quite particular sorts of riddles and beasts, as are Jordan’s ‘channeling,’ and Tolkien’s ‘ring.’ But sometimes I think that sort of bold and explicit vocabulary-loading obscures the way words that aren’t connected to the invented universe and technology of the story gather momentum and character by use. (Think of the way ‘honest’ is used and twisted in Othello, for example.) Every form of fiction, even mimetic, ‘literary’ (eh, you know what I mean) fiction, engages in this kind of lexical worldbuilding. You hear ‘teach the reader how to read the text,’ and often we think that means in a structural, House of Leaves sort of way, but it also conveys—what do these words mean, here? What sorts of things can be broken? Which ones are sharp? What are lost?
When we say ‘structure,’ talking about a book, we’re often referring to plot and story, to the events that happen and the choices the characters make, how these relieve or build tension, or contribute to the thematic argument. But in a book, characters, plot, and story, are all composed of language, emergent from it, and a focus on event and image and theme, which are relatively large scale and easy to see, can obscure the subtler structure of words that undergird and uphold the rest, like fascia in the body.
Sometimes a writer works on this subtle structure consciously and with vicious intent—my favorite example being how Steven King calls his book It, and gives that name to the monster, and by so doing undermines the entire language of the book as the monster (literally) undermines the town of Derry and its inhabitants’ psychology, relationships, families, loves. King weaves his evil shapeshifting orange-haired clown through everyday utterances and descriptions, makes it (see what I mean) impossible to speak without invoking the evil. He’s writing a horror that has so permeated the fabric of society that it’s not so much unspeakable, as impossible to speak without it. (He said it again! Oh no, now I’ve said it!) It’s great. It’s ‘great.’
But more often this vocabulary, this structure emerges in the writing of the book, as part of the stride a writer hits. In my experience they’re part of an explicit battle plan with about the same frequency as, when running, we tend to think, “okay, now contract this part of the calf muscle.” Which is where revision comes in. For those connections to function, they have to be subtle. if you call something a ghost one page, and something else a ghost on the very next page, or in the very next paragraph, or (gulp) sentence, meaning and context hasn’t had time to ripen. It’s like hearing yourself repeated on a one-second delay. But: if you replace every single repeated interesting word with a thesaurus alternative, you’ll disrupt the subtle structures and lose some of the accumulated momentum of the text—without even realizing what you’re doing! So you stare at two ghosts side by side, and ask: which is the most haunting?
It’s wonderful and maddening detail work. I feel like Indiana Jones before the idol in Raiders of the Lost Ark, adding sand to his bag, then subtracting sand. But sooner or later, you have to make the swap.
Be well. Take care of yourselves. Play games. What has repeated itself, in your art, or play, or writing, or reading, lately? What have you returned to?
This is so great, & I love the title of this so much. Co-sign, etc.
The “insipience” that immediately comes to mind for me is GGK’s use of “scintilla” in Fionavar—the first time it comes up I am awed by the word that sounds like the point of a diamond, & by the second instance I’m just squinting, the repetition obscuring all the other text around it.
What a wonderful a post! I love this topic, and I love thinking about words in books. Thank you as always for the inspiration :)
In Russian literature, this comes up with the more poetic of the authors -- Gogol, Bulgakov. Bulgakov very carefully cuts between heavy, ponderous language in the Biblical part of Master and Margarita and simpler, modernist prose in the present day part -- you'd be hard-pressed to find many repetitions beyond commons words. But there is a notable exception: the author spends a great amount of both parts talking about the "storm" (groza) that is about to overtake Moscow / Jerusalem. The word is one of the key unifiers of these two very disparate stories, and calls the reader's attention to other similarities, weaving the book together. B. also uses an old Russian spelling of Jerusalem, Ershalaim, that used to grate me at first but now definitely sticks with me as one of the stylistic anchors of the book. Really fun stuff :)
In my current project, I am struggling to talk about magic in a different way than most fantasy authors talk about it, because I want the player to think about magic in a different way -- something more like oil in our world than sunshine and rainbows. It's not quite a Dark Curse that you'd find in gothic novels, not quite like Herbert's Spice but similar -- scarce and dangerous enough to be a threat if you really think about it, but not obviously so to the everyday observer. I decided to use the verb "spell" in strange ways as a placeholder, and am happy enough with it for now. Let's see if it survives the revisions!