The same thing is true when it comes to our books... but when you're writing a novel, it can be easy to lose track of the beats you've already covered. And if you find yourself essentially telling the same jokes over and over again, your audience is going to lose interest, and put down your book before they even get close to the end.
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| Hmmm... wait a minute... have I had too many dramatic reveals? |
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Don't Let Your Readers Go Nose Blind
We've all had those situations where we go nose blind to something. Maybe it's the smell of the dirty clothes hamper in your room, the garbage in the kitchen, or the cat box you keep meaning to get around to cleaning. Whatever it is, the smell hits you hard when you first walk into it. Over exposure and time, though, you acclimate to it, until your brain stops registering it as an important stimulus.
The same thing can happen with your writing, if you aren't careful.
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| Ah yes, a dramatic fight scene... again. I'm just gonna go to the bathroom, I think. |
In the broad strokes of your storytelling, this can take the form of particular patterns and story beats that you keep coming back to. For example, if every love interest your protagonist has gets killed, pretty soon that is going to stop feeling poignant, and start to make your readers' eyes roll. If every time an old friend shows up to help they end up betraying someone, pretty soon it's going to feel like old hat. If every time our lead has sex with someone they end up falling deeply, madly in love with them (and that isn't some kind of curse that's relevant to the plot) it's going to get stale. Even if you end up having fights every three chapters, but those fights always feel samey instead of tense, that can get seriously boring.
Fortunately, the broad strokes are fairly easy to spot when you're writing a book because it forms a pattern. If a given situation occurs more than once in a particular narrative (or even in a series) that's when you have to review what's happening, and ask if it's different enough from the previous instance to keep, or if you need to change things up a bit more. This is especially true if the situations are similar, but the different iterations are meant to show how things have changed either for good or ill (relationships falling apart, a student who has mastered a particular fighting style, etc.).
What can be a tougher habit to break is when you fall into a particular pattern for what I'm going to call your book's choreography.
This is most prominent in love scenes and fight scenes, likely because you have to keep track of a lot of moving parts, and to be sure the audience can follow the action as the scene unfolds. However, it's all too easy to start using the same types of descriptions, and the same scene-by-scene beats, so that a given fight or sex scene feels like it was almost copied and pasted from previous sections in the book. And even when these scenes aren't blow-for-blow exactly the same, if they're similar enough then your audience may feel like you're just showing them the same thing again.
In this case, it can also be compared to the spectacle moves in a video game. Yeah, it was really impressive the first time you pulled out the head-snap-heart-punch-inversion-dim-mak maneuver, but after the 60th time of seeing that combo used on a character, the viewer is just waiting for the animation to end so they can get on with the game. The easy solution is, of course, to make sure that when you're going through your first round of edits that you bookmark scenes like this (or any other scenes you write that might bleed together in their descriptive details), and read them over side-by-side. Just as with the broad strokes, make sure that they're different enough that you're providing your audience with a unique viewing experience.
Think of the elements of these scenes like Taco Bell ingredients. Yes, everything is made out of the same stuff... but changing up those ingredients, even a little, can produce a significantly different experience that feels wholly unique, even if its components are the exact same as what's next on the menu.
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