This Is Why We, As Writers, Repeat Ourselves
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Spirituality, Philosophy, Self, Creativity, Writing

My freshman year of college, I signed up to write for a publication where I had to write a 500 word or more articles every week. I struggled. Write every single week? And find a new idea to write about? It seemed absolutely impossible at the time — which is funny given how much I write now.

One week, I wrote what must have been my eighth article. I wasn’t used to writing that much and I wrote about depression and why it was okay to seek help — but I’d written on the same topic about three weeks ago.

The next day, my cross country coach at the time pointed out to me that I recycled my content and I wrote the same thing three weeks ago. I felt absolutely terrible about doing so. It felt so good to write and flowed so well, so was it just easy to write because, well, I’d written about it before?

Remington Write has captured the same feeling of feeling like she’s written about the same topic before. Remington states that just because you write about the same topic, doesn’t mean you write the same thing. You can come at a topic from a different angle, more evidence, fresh insights, and deeper conclusions.

However, the words of my coach that “you wrote the same thing three weeks ago” stick with me. Am I recycling my content? How many times in every article do I give the same thoughts and offer the same advice? How many times do I say “I couldn’t have done it without Jesus Christ, my Lord and Savior?” Is any of my writing original? Am I just repeating myself and the words of people I read?

Well, if I’m writing a theme or message multiple times, even if I’m doing it with a fresh angle or perspective, it means that it’s a topic that I’ve thought seriously about and that seriously resonates with me. Remington captures perfectly the conundrum that we feel when we’re writing something similar to what we did before:

“Now what the hell was I supposed to do? Quit?”

But the truth is that nothing will be 100% original. Unless you live under a rock, you’re going to be influenced by people around you, and as a writer, you will be influenced by what you read as well as what you think about. On a deeper level, it’s unnatural not to write the same thing twice.

For example, I must have included the line “write something no one can write” instead of generic self-help pieces about six or seven separate times. They might come with different contexts and experiences, but the fact remains that I, as well as every other writer, repeat myself.

Even if you’re giving the same advice and writing about the same topic, however, you do come in with a new angle every time. As a runner, I run the same route and the same roads a couple times every week. Am I on the same run? Absolutely not — or else it would be a lot easier of a run.

Similarly, as a writer, even if I’m writing about the same message or the same topic, it’s not about what I’m saying as much as how I’m saying it. The writing and the voice mature every single time and, Remington notes, “you’re going to find yourself retreading a lot of the same ground.”

So unless all you actually do is copy and paste, you’re not writing the same thing twice — again, nothing will be 100% original. You’re always building off of your old self, and part of that as a writer includes incorporating some of the style and ideas from your old writing. Every single writer does that.

Charles Dickens, for example, can have most of his novels summarized in one recurring theme: an orphan that goes from rags to riches with the help of a benevolent, rich benefactor. And yet Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations are very different books with very different reading experiences, even if they share similar themes. If you want to read the same Dickens book twice, you don’t go from book to book — you read the same book.

Reading the same book and watching the same TV show over and over does have a lot of its own merits — I know that I personally, I have found details I completely missed in a re-read or a re-watch.

But back to the point of writers repeating themselves, it seems like F. Scott Fitzgerald seemed to embrace the fact that writers repeat themselves over and over:

“Mostly we authors must repeat ourselves–that’s the truth. We have two or three great and moving experiences so great and so moving that it doesn’t seem at the time that anybody else has been so caught up …and we tell our two or three stories each time in a new disguise–maybe ten times, maybe a hundred, as long as people will listen.”

Because of my paranoia about repeating myself in my writing and my attempted avoidance in doing so, I diversify the topics I write about — a lot, so that when I return to write an article about basketball and the NBA, for example, it won’t sound exactly the same as the last one I wrote.

Writers have all sorts of insecurities about having writer’s block or not having enough ideas, according to blogger Michael Steinberg. But what about the anxiety of repeating yourself? Steinberg talks about a fear that “I was destined to become a one-note writer” like a typecast Hollywood actors who play the same role in every movie, or like bands whose songs all sound the same.

Steinberg then did a personal inquiry about why writers like himself tend to work with persistent and recurring ideas, while others pursued a lot of different subjects. He called up a friend who told him that David Foster Wallace, too, felt like he was repeating himself. A lot of novelists very high on the food chain felt like they were repeating themselves frequently too, which validated Steinberg a bit.

He would speak to Renee E. D’Aoust, a fiction writer, who said she was trying to move away from writing about dance, like Steinberg was trying to stop writing about baseball, and she mentioned it to her college classroom. A student asked her the following;

“But if you love, and do it so well, why would you quit writing about the subject?”

Another writer Steinberg talked to who wrote about baseball often said that he felt like he had some authority over writing about baseball since Thoreau wrote about beans, Melville wrote about whales, and Poe wrote about a bird. Through permission and obsession, writers repeat themselves out of convenience and because it just happens rather than trying to repeat themselves — that realization gave Steinberg the solace to keep writing about baseball as a twin passion to his writing.

At the end of his essay, Steinberg and explains why writers repeat themselves:

“So then, whether we repeat subjects like dance or baseball; or re-use island-like settings, we writers, I believe, are compelled by nature and disposition to search for ways that allow us to make better sense out of the chaos and confusions that comprise our individual and collective lives.”

Existentially, as writers, we want to make sense of the chaos and confusion of our lives, and we tend to write about the things that bring us the most chaos, the most confusion. The fact that we may frequently repeat subjects or settings is natural because those are the subjects of places we want to explore more deeply. If you, like me, find yourself writing about the same thing several times, it means that that thing has some sort of power and meaning over you.

When I tell people several times to “write something no one else can write,” it’s a plea for embracing our own individuality, uniqueness, and humanity over what we see as mainstream. I will stand by that notion and those priorities any day of the week — and so I think it’s okay that I repeat myself so often, and that I may sacrifice some of my originality in doing so.