The upside of writing lots of pages at a time is feeling like a rock star. The down side is feeling repetitive. It feels like I've typed "he said/she said" a gazillion times by now, even with making an effort not to tag all the dialogue the same.
Oddly enough, though, I was reassured about it a few nights ago by none other than a dream. In the dream I came across three second-hand books by Stephen King. I have no idea what the titles were, but the fact that they were by King was crystal clear. Now, the previous owner had put sticky tabs in the books that were coordinated with each other. When I looked at a tab in one book, then a tab in another, I realized the person had marked identical sentences. In short, they had marked where King repeated himself.
Yes, I know it's just a dream, but when I woke up I felt better about the voice in my head saying I was being redundant. After all, there are only so many ways to tag a line of dialogue and even the most brilliant writers can't always say the same thing in different ways. Now I'm reminding myself I just have to use the words that get the job done and not worry about it. My readers aren't going to notice, and if they do, that's what revision is for.
2 comments:
You know what else I love about this dream? You marked the tags with tags. That's pretty awesome. I'm also jealous you dreamt about King. I have yet to have a King dream.
This is a great dream and I'm not even much of a King fan. And it is so easy to become fixated on one (usually) minor thing about your own writing and become obsessed. Then to have reassurance by a dream! Perfect.
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