Le Guin's Steering The Craft, Chapter Four: Repetition (w/ exercise four, part one)

Repetition, of course, is central to all writing, indeed it is central to any pattern making and thus to all art, and much more besides.  My thoughts on repetition, however, have largely come from the poetic traditions, where the music of words is celebrated far more bombastically.  So, it is no surprise to me that Le Guin begins her discussion by disagreeing with the "bossy" adults who tell us, in our youth, to avoid using a word too often in a page, let alone a paragraph or sentence.  She then discusses how the use of repetition in fiction can often be spaced out in a far larger way than in a poem, but also is careful to show that, artfully executed, a repetition of words or phrases can be tremendously effective even in a shorter passage.

As well, she discusses the use of repetition in terms of story elements.  I think of my favorite such usage, which comes, not from a story, but from a play, Chekhov's The Seagull.  Those who know the piece will remember the short play within a play that is shown twice, the first time as a ridiculous and misguided effort, the second with a pathos that reinterprets the entire meaning through the new context the play has created.  Effectively done, it is magic, and yet, when I think about it, I do not know that I had really considered such repetitions overtly.  Again, it is a thing that I am sure I have been aware of, and may even have played with, but I never considered it in the same way as I have considered linguistic repetition.  Merely by bringing the ideas together, a new understanding grows that is certain to provide a richer degree of control and intent for my writing.  For example, by considering this type of structure as an analog of the musicality of language, I can think of how a story structure might, in some sense, be formal the way a poem is.  This meaning would be entirely different, of course, in execution, but the kind of regularity and repetition that occurs in the language could be imposed on the structure of the story itself.

Next, LeGuin provides a number of example passages from works of literature she admires.  She focuses upon the first form of repetition, which can be understood, for it would be hard to show the other type of repetition effectively in such excerpts.  It is a shape that contains, clearly, the whole narrative, and would probably require too much space for an effective example.  The pieces she chooses do convey how much more subtle one must be in prose where repetition is concerned.  Even just one word, used again and again, will build a depth of meaning, while also being capable of providing a rhythmic marker that can be used in constructing a conversation between the sound and the meaning.

The exercises today are, as I expected from my work yesterday, developing in complexity, I think.  They feel more serious today, in some way, and the work in the second exercise seems to come closer to asking that the participant go beyond the language and think about deeper issues of story construction.  The first part is to write a narrative paragraph in which you intentionally repeat a significant word at least three times.  The second is to write a longer piece of up to 1000 words that includes the repetition of the same event in some way.  She stresses that it need not be the same characters, and does not have to be an identical event, and is clear that this does not need to be a whole story.


Exercise Four, Parts 1 and 2: Again and Again and Again

Part 1: Verbal repetition



He is a foreigner they say, though where he comes from nobody seems to discuss.  Just foreign.  He doesn't like our food, they say, he wants his food, his foreign dishes.  Strange things that no one here would eat or know how to make.  Things that need all those foreign spices that he thinks are exotic but are really just strange to anyone local.  He reads foreign books, and watches foreign shows.  His thoughts are foreign.  How can they know him?  Why should we want to when he is not really here, they think, he stays foreign, will not drink our local drinks.  He has too many customs from away, the foreign way for this, the foreign way for that.  This is our land, why can he not understand this is not a land for foreign customs.  This is our land, they will think.  He is the foreigner here.  He is the one from away.  They wish he would stop it, would stop being foreign, would stop reminding them the world is more than here.





I am coming back after a short break in working.  The first part of the exercise was quite interesting, and I do have a lot to say about it and how it seemed to come together, but the second exercise is the one that I am most intrigued by.  Having said that, I am finding it more difficult to do, which is why I have taken a break.  I will finish it tonight, but I need to consider it a bit more and come up with a hook for it, with content that I think can work.


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