(6 min read.) Repeat your best ideas. This creative advice is backed by neuroscience and can help you please readers and build a fanbase. It also makes writing easier.
Yup. Repetition makes reading your work more fun. It makes writing less stressful and strenuous, because you know what you’re doing. It also earns fans by making your voice more identifiable.
Y’all know how many times George R.R. Martin has a character eat “bread and salt” in his GOT books? How many Alfred Hitchcock movies have a stylish blonde woman at the core of the mystery? I wouldn’t call either of these guys a role model but I will say this: their work sticks in the memory. I can tell their work is their work from a mile away. Repetition (within each project and across their body of work) is a huge piece of why.
Repeating what you do makes you the writer you are. Aaron “Oscar, Golden Globe, Emmy, and BAFTA winner” Sorkin even recycles quippy dialogue exactly verbatim from one project to the next (it’s a fact.) Personally, I think Aaron Sorkin’s writing sucks. But with all those awards on his shelf, I’d guess his writing is an okay standard to hold yourself to if you’re interested in a healthy career. If he can repeat actual chunks of words and get an Emmy for it, you can take this creative advice to heart without feeling like you’re unprofessional.
The Neuroscience of Repeating Ideas
If you want people to remember something, it’s useful to offer it to them more than once. The neuroscience of memory teaches us that it helps people remember a piece of information best if they meet it repeatedly, at intervals, over a period of time. If you show me a fact three times on different days (once today, then again on Wednesday, then again six weeks from now), it’ll be much more helpful to my memory than simply showing me that same fact three times in a row right now. This is called spaced repetition (science fact.)
So, if you want people to remember something, whether it’s a simple fact like a character’s hair color or a vital world-changing concept like “peace only happens if we work for it,” it’s nice to share that idea once but it’s even nicer to also then bring it up AGAIN later. Say the same thing two or three times. At least.
You’re not padding your work.
You’re simply making it MEMORABLE. And you’re making it possible for the reader to enjoy it more.
Why this Creative Advice Makes Readers Happy
The human brain loves repetition. Loves it. Looooooooooooves it.
Our minds are natural pattern-seekers and repetition gives us the satisfaction of witnessing patterns in actions. We notice a pattern, we get a neurological reward. Writing is an opportunity to give your readers so much satisfaction. If you take nothing else from this creative advice, try to take this: when you repeat yourself, people connect the dots and get a thrill.
If you want to get people hooked on your story (or on your entire body of work) give them something recognizable that happens over and over. Think of a director working with the same actors but having them play different roles in different films. Think of a catchy chorus in a pop song. The brain loves the ease and comfort of something predictable enough that it can follow along.
Let people follow along with your best ideas.
They’ll have a good time.
The key to opening up that joy? Repetition plus variation.
You can repeat exactly the same thing over and over. But I suspect that you, a creative genius, can have more fun than that. Here are a few kinds of variations to explore:
* Play with context: the same action gets repeated in your story, but in one situation it’s heroic and in another situation it’s awful.
* Play with scale: make it big, then very small, then even bigger.
* Play with tone: do it funny, then sad, then even sadder.
* Play with depth: do the long version, then a shorter version, then the shortest possible version.
* Play with voice: put the same idea in the mouth of one main character, then of a different main character, then of a random side character who’s just walking through the room holding a mop.
* Play with predictability: let the idea be obvious the first time, then see if you can sneak it out again later as a surprise. How many times can you win at “peek-a-boo” by revealing the same thing in different ways?
Those are a few things I love to try. You’ll find your own ways to think about variation. Engage your creativity in how often (and how differently) to repeat and re-use your best ideas.
Personally, I think everyone should repeat their best ideas. And I think everyone should add some amount of variation. But how much variation you like to add when you repeat things is part of what creates your voice, and part of what creates your unique appeal for fans.
How this Creative Advice Builds Fans
The difference between a reader and a fan is that a reader wants to read some writing. A fan wants to read YOUR writing. You can only have fans if they’re able to tell your writing apart from somebody else’s.
As a writer, your voice is created by what you say and how you say it. So when you say something you like, say it again. When you do something you like (make a joke, leave a backstory mysterious, end a scene in the middle), do it again. Repeat your best ideas (a kind of character, a kind of narrative structure, a kind of message, a kind of setting, a kind of pacing, a kind of insight) and those things will become your signature.
If you repeat something enough times, it becomes your voice.
Let your voice evolve towards a skilled distillation of your very favorite ideas. Noticing what went well and then deliberately doing it again forever is the best way I know of to like your own writing more every day and to help others recognize who you are. That’s good value for a single writing technique.
Your voice might already be very distinctive. Maybe you’re that lucky writer who is wildly unique right away. Still useful to follow this creative advice and get even MORE identifiably distinctive. Even really original writers often refine their voices to become more defined and specific over the course of their careers. You can fast-track that by making sure that as you discover things you love to do, you repeat them again in the future. As you find your favorite moves and ideas, keep them with you for the next writing project.
Get unique enough, and your voice can even become its own genre (or sub-genre.) A beautiful and ambitious goal. Would you write differently if you were trying to become not just an author, but the founder of a new genre?
Yes, this Creative Advice Makes Writing Easier
It’s okay to repeat your best ideas. Some people experience kind of a moral resistance about this. If you do, I think it’s great to get over it.
You don’t have to re-invent the wheel every time you sit down to the page. If you want to, that’s cool; for years I tried to make every project completely different from the last. Ultimately, I’ve decided it’s okay to let things be easier.
I’m allowed to benefit from the work I did yesterday, last year, and five years ago. Because no matter what I write: a lot of people are meeting this project for the first time. They haven’t already seen my best ideas. I would love to show them.
Have Bigger Impact with this Creative Advice
When you repeat your ideas, you give your returning audience a better chance of remembering them. You also give a new audience a chance to meet those ideas for the first time.
If you said the same thing differently, could it reach someone different?
Repeating your best ideas for wider impact can be as simple as putting the same idea in fresh wording. You might want to write one version of your best ideas in simple language, and another that’s targeted towards a more challenging reading level. (I’ll blog about reading levels soon, but for now this is a reasonably useful resource.) Simply writing out the same basic concept for an audience at a different reading level than your own can be a wonderful (and inclusive!) exercise.
You might also want to repeat your ideas in different genres, mediums, and marketplaces.
Repeating your ideas is PRACTICAL because it gives you multiple chances at impact for multiple audiences. If you can write one in-depth version of your idea that’s a 1,000-word blog post and then find a way a way to also repeat the idea with a light-touch version of that same concept that can be seen at a glance on a single Instagram slide, you’ll simply matter more.
If you really believe in a given moral or set of values, can you reach sci-fi fans by setting a fable with that message on Mars, but then go on to have it all and reach even more readers by writing another fable espousing that same vital message but via a totally “realistic” setting like an office building in Ohio? Try some experiments and see what you can offer the world.
It’s generous to repeat your best ideas.
It helps.
(If you’ve got another 2 mins, get some of my best creative advice in How to Build a Writing Habit Without Burnout.)
xo, megan
Or just go home to the blog.
These (hopefully) really quite helpful creative writing tips offer what I’ve learned as an award-winning author who writes a million words a year, and what I’ve learned about supporting others as a private writing coach.
There’s no one way to write. There’s only your way. I hope some of my tactics and ideas can help you find it.
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curious/confused?: what does a writing coach do (and not do)
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