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One of my favourite pieces of literary advice is a very cleverly written passage from Gary Provost:

This sentence has five words. Here are five more words. Five-word sentences are fine. But several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It’s like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length, and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences. And I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes, when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals–sounds that say listen to this, it is important.

This is all terrific advice. Pacing is incredibly impactful stuff. And it resonates with people because simply varying the length of your sentences is an immediately accessible method of breathing fresh air into your prose.

However, using a repetitive sentence length is just one of many ways to dull your writing. Indeed, most writing is dull! Not because the author is dull but because sentences and paragraphs have a lot of things going on all at once and while we are focusing on varying one thing (“I already used ‘beautiful’, so I had better use a synonym now instead...”) it is very easy to overlook that our prose is static in some other way that has slipped our attention.

So here are a few more clever ways to use — or avoid! — repetition in your prose.

Let’s start with phonetic repetition. Consider the following paragraph:

This sentence is short and sweet. Several words start with ‘s’. Notice also the subtle ‘s’ sounds and those inside the words. I use plurals. I use ‘use’. I use ‘notice’, not ‘look at’. Say all this aloud and see how ‘sss’—the pleasant sound of a warm shower or leaves rustling in the wind—slides easily from your lips. Perhaps our protagonist is outdoors on the sidewalk on a sunny day. This way, as our protagonist enters the skyscraper, we can very quickly make it angular and pointy. A bit brutal, even. The air con cranked too high for comfort. We make a very cold, corporate environment for him not only by what we put in that environment but in conjunction cutting out the easy, pleasant roundedness of the ‘s’-based syllables we saw outdoors in favour of a much bleaker ‘k’ phonetic.

Of course, abusing the same phonetic will make your story sound like a euphuism (no, not euphemism) or tongue twister — and it’s hard to take those seriously! In moderation, though, painting your environments with a distinct phonetic palette can be a clever supporting element to the atmosphere you are going for, especially while forming a first impression.

Next let’s think about colour repetition. Here’s a more subtle example this time. Try to catch what’s going on:

The elevator door opens. A man in a grey suit sizes him up and plainly doesn’t like what he sees—disdain written in the pallid corners of his mouth that lingers even as he looks away. Our protagonist immediately feels underdressed. He has been a fool. What was he thinking, coming to a place like this in jeans? A battered shirt, no holes yet but close, and sneakers that squeak and decompress loudly on the marble floor as he gets into the lift? Fuck. How embarrassing. Well, nothing for it now. He hits seventeen, not once but twice, so tentative the first time the button fails to stick. Steel doors close hard—*hard*...? what kind of elevator door closes that fast? jesus—and reflect a zit, no, a tenth goddamn planet, red bang smack bang on his forehead yet somehow missed in his morning prep.

Now, it’s no surprise that our protagonist is walking into a very grey environment. Most skyscrapers are grey! But some make more of an effort than others to be warm and inviting, or fresh and hip, and a reader that works in such a skyscraper might not intuit the same imagery as the author.

So notice how the paragraph above cleverly hammers home a sense of grey sterility by what it chooses to highlight. The man is wearing a grey suit. His mouth is pallid. The floor is marble. And the steel doors are polished and clean enough to not only reflect our protagonist, but to do so in vibrant colour. All of these things are relentlessly grey — even though the word ‘grey’ itself is only mentioned once!

This serves to make the reveal of our protagonist’s pimple all the more impactful. This isn’t just any bright red zit. It is a bright red zit in a desaturated sea of cleanliness and proper presentation, bound to attract anyone’s attention.

Finally, let’s talk about thematic repetition. Imitating events from earlier in your story can be a clever way to create powerful motifs that stick with your reader and add depth — see if you can identify any below!

He is considering popping it, ducking off to a bathroom and blasting the thing all over some undeserving mirror, when the doors open again. A granite plaque with MACMILLAN—font Trajan, kerning perfect—in gold greets him at eye level and offers a leftfacing triangle as advice. Grey suit goes that way. No sign of a restroom. He follows grey suit left.

The receptionist is almost entirely hidden by her desk, a function of her own short stature and white plastic panels clearly installed with a taller desk chair in mind. Only a dark bun and a sliver of forehead poke over the top. Probably she is looking at a monitor. He decides to cough a bit to get her attention, then decides against it—just say hello, moron!—but the cough is already coming out and his trying to stop it only allows its pressure to build a moment longer before it escapes as this hacking, grating thing that even he thinks means he’s dying. The sliver of forehead tilts back and two slate eyes quite clearly expect a better greeting than that.

“Hello. I’m here to see Mr. Lloyd.”

She is looking at his zit.

“About my book.”

She is still looking at his zit, processing. Most likely deciding whether or not to alert some astronomical authority, he guesses, but eventually she deigns, with a perfect Swedish accent, mind you, to shuttle him along.

“On your left.”

There is a corridor to his left that he finds to hold eight cubicles, four on either side, and it occurs to him that “on your left” was as near to useless information as she possibly could have given. (Where else could he have gone?) But if he retreats to ask again he’ll seem an idiot. So he zigzags up the corridor, reading the door signage, sneakers trumpeting his passage all the way until at last MR. LLOYD adorns the seventh door—on the right of the hallway, he thinks resentfully—so he raps the door and waits.

Grey suit opens the door and looks at his zit. Oh god.

“Mr. Lloyd. I’m here to see you, about my book.”

Better to rush through it. Take attention off it fast. Grey suit—Lloyd, he self-corrects—walks back to his chair and sits down. His chair is black leather and plush, new. The chair opposing him is chalkboard green and old. Shit, it looks stackable, even. He feels like a kid.

He sits down while Lloyd rifles through a stack of binders, wincing as the door—which he’d forgotten quite completely, spellbound by the Ikea™ Power Differential at play—pointedly slams shut. Desperate for any sign of hope, he convinces himself that the binders alone are a good omen. Of *course* Macmillan still print the manuscripts they receive. Old school. Neat. He’s in the hands of a pro now, which makes him feel better about the zit. A pro wouldn’t hold it against him. Would they?

Lloyd finds the binder he is looking for and places it on the desk. There it is. A real thing. A real manuscript on a real desk, most likely reformatted to Times New Roman and double-spaced, the way pros do it, he’s sure, with red pen all over it too where there are things to fix—but he’ll fix them alright, it’s no worry, really. What’s important is the message inside. The message his whole life has been building up to.

Lloyd opens the binder and flicks to the first page.

Times New Roman. Double-spaced. The way pros do it.

No red pen.

Lloyd looks at him. Then his zit. Then him again.

. . .

“It’s just not very good.”

Well, I mean. What do you say to that?

He wants to ask Lloyd if he noticed all the tricks he used. The motifs, the metaphor—the carefully calibrated melody of it all. Had it really all been for nothing...? Look, he hadn't assumed stardom was upon him. He knows he’s no Pynchon, no Dostoevsky. He’s no Beckett, no-one is. But he was at least clever, wasn’t he? If something’s wrong, he’ll fix it. Maybe he got carried away at times, that he’d understand, but the potential is surely there, something publishable is there—it has to be. Look at the way he... you know, the arcs and everything… he had been clever, damn it! Something must have gotten mixed up. Mistaken. No red pen. What the hell man, no red pen? You read it, didn’t you? Didn’t you see the way I was clever?

But he doesn’t say any of that.

All he says is

“Okay.”

Lloyd looks at him. Closes the binder. And that’s that.