I Tell You Three Times

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

Yesterday I blew my top – in a thoroughly ladylike manner.  Okay, in a lady who wears fishnet stockings manner (but I wear pearls, too, and everyone knows pearls mean you’re lady!) – about repetitive sex scenes that add nothing to the plot.  (Yes, I am the sort of person who will downgrade an erotic novel because of spelling mistakes.  And I totally will point out if your magic system doesn’t fit in with any magical system known to men.  And don’t get me started on your utopian version of communitarian pre-history.  No.  Just don’t.  And if you’re smart don’t bring it up at a panel with me.  No, just don’t.)

However, there’s something I long ago realized.  I need to repeat myself.  I say it again, I need to repeat myself.

To clarify – I realized sometime ago (Okay, a year or so.  I’m not that bright, and besides, this is pretty hard to believe) that I’m not the center of everyone’s universe.  Specifically, I’m not the center of the universe for everyone who reads either this blog or my books.

To put it bluntly – and shockingly.  I mean, who knew? – you people don’t sit there and wait with rapt attention for me to pronounce myself on something.  When you meet me at cons most of you don’t carry notebooks and pencils to jot down my every utterance.  (A few of you do, of course, for which I’m incredibly grateful.  Also, slightly creeped out.)

What this means, as incredible as it may seem is that I often have to repeat myself.  And by this I don’t mean I have to say exactly what I said before, as in “Get up.”  “Wipe your nose.”  “Learn some history!”  “Think for yourself.”  “Get off my lawn.”  But more subtle stuff.

I’ve long ago found out that not only I but every author must embed the same information at least three times in a novel, if the information is crucial and you want people to get it before you get to the plot point for which it is essential.  Because, you never know – shocking I know! – people might get distracted just as they’re about to read that one paragraph, then unintentionally skip a paragraph.  It might even happen twice.

So, say, if my character has a special psychic power that allows her to talk to bunnies, I might mention it once, then have another character talk about it and then hang a flag on it, by having her hold a conversation with a bunny in a verdant meadow.

If it’s a more shocking psychic power, say an ability to detect a soul in a politician, it might require a couple more repetitions.

This I’ve known and accepted for some time.

But more importantly, I’ve found in doing blog posts that just covering a theme once won’t do.  This is sometimes because, well, things change.  Like, it’s amazing how my view on self-publishing has changed in the last year.  But it’s also because, frankly, people aren’t going to search my blog archive back for four years, or even because their perspective is so different that the way I covered a theme before didn’t make sense, but a slightly different approach will.

This is very difficult for me, since normally I don’t like saying the same thing twice in non-fiction.  I used to think that if I explained things to people just ONCE they’d “get” it and then change their minds (or not.)

But I find that this isn’t true.  Just as with fiction, people need to hear it repeated a few times, before it sinks to the “oh, yeah, of course” level.  The more shocking the topic, the more it needs to be repeated.  And most people, of course, are more willing to die than to think.

So I find that like someone lost in a spiraling labyrinth, I need to repeat myself in a slightly different way each time, and each time the ensuing discussion will reveal people got it SLIGHTLY differently.  Which is fine.  And also the way they get it influences the way I think about it, setting myself up for the slightly different next post on the subject.

It’s a rather startling process.

Yes.  I’m serious.  No, I mean it.

I tell you three times.

15 thoughts on “I Tell You Three Times”

  1. Hmm. As a newbie writer, I didn’t know this! Repeating oneself thrice is the key to having my crit readers NOT continue to tell me “Uh, I didn’t see that coming” when, in point of fact, it was RIGHT THERE, buried in an otherwise useless paragraph on page three. RIGHT THERE, I tell you!

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    1. stoopid crit readers, don’t know to sit up, get out their notebooks and TAKE NOTES. They don’t realize there WILL be a quiz. I know. I feel your pain. I often run into their incompetence, too, and have to — sigh — repeat myself for their benefit…

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    2. As a teacher I’ve ALWAYS known this. Richard Krautheimer, art historian had a saying. First, I’m going to tell what I’m going to tell you, then I’m going to tell it to you, then I’m going to tell you what I’ve just said.

      Except in academia you have to be even more didactic about it than in fiction.

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  5. This appears as a parody of The Purpose Driven Life. However, there is a deeper lesson to be drawn from it. Religion (at least the Judaism I practice and the Christianity I see around me) is primarily a matter of attitudes, preferences for one course of action rather than another. Knowledge (or belief) and skills play a part, but ultimately it’s about what you choose to do.

    Changing attitudes is hard. New year’s resolutions seldom last until February 1st. To change an attitude, you often need to repeat the lesson over and over. Orthodox Jews do it by praying three times a day, and each of those prayers includes asking God for certain attitudes. Other religions also use repetition in other variations.

    But our generation is chronically overstimulated. We are so used to tuning out things, it’s all too easy to tune out messages that literally repeat themselves. One solution is to present the message in different fashion each time. Use jokes (such as “Porpoise Driven Life”) to get people to listen, and embed the attitude changing lesson in those jokes.

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  6. They do say 3 is the magic number. However “I will win the lottery, I will win the lottery, I will win the lottery” sure didn’t work. :( I do agree reiterating something can be important, but what I hate is when an author does so in a way that should be obviouse even to the character and they still don’t get it. My opinion of you and the character is going to drop considerably. Thankfully I’ve never caught you doing that and I thank you for it. :)

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  7. Speaking as one who was frequently wont to trip over fire hydrants (amongst other things) while reading, there are very good reasons readers sometimes fail to pick-up cues imbedded in the text.

    Speaking as one who has been forced to acknowledge my memory no longer functions to hold information as well as it did in my youth (I think I’ve reached capacity so that each additional byte forces deletion of a random byte) I sadly acknowledge occasionally forgetting a character trait introduced in chapter three, book one by the time I’ve reached book four, chapter thirty-two.

    Speaking as one who speaks as one, I’ve forgotten the third point I was going to make to compleat this triad about the power of three.

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  9. Most people would rather die than think? Well that explains a great deal. I had not considered it quite that way before. I had always thought that it was just a lack of proper exposure and training when they were young. I come from a family that just leaks thinking. I guess I also just hang out with the wrong folks … and that is why so many others flee.

    Thus, regarding the ‘but that is the way it is in’ phenomena: I suspect that if you are going to challenge the popular way a archetype is viewed it would be easiest to so in a manner that first draws the reader in to the story — thus they have largely accepted the new way in context before they quite realize their general supposition has been challenged.

    And I can’t help but think that there is a good reason that the self-appointed expert who had only ever published one book had only ever published one book. (Beautifully told and YOU didn’t need to repeat it three times. Of course the short story format differs from long form.)

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