Recently I’ve been reading The Last Murder at the End of the World, which is overall a pretty enjoyable post-apocalyptic utopia murder mystery. So far I’ve only noticed the author using “stated” once, although once I noticed that I also noticed him using a lot of words besides “said”. I also noticed that he’s doing a very good job of a third-person omniscient viewpoint, which is not easy — I don’t even try to do it.

What I also noticed is that he has one repetitive action that the main character Emory does. Every time she gets her hair wet, she wrings it out. Doesn’t matter if she’s swimming, dunking her head in a stream, or washing her hair; if her hair gets wet, she wrings it out.

That’s a totally normal thing to do, by the way. If you have long hair and it gets wet, you usually wring it out, right? (I’m not sure; I don’t have long hair. Or any hair. But I digress.) And I’m a big fan of little touches of humanity that help to develop a character. Thing is, I’m noticing it. Emory’s hair gets wet at least four times in the book (so far; I’m not quite done yet, but I’m close). I don’t need to be told every single time that she wrings out her hair; telling me the first time will set the image in my mind of what she does when her hair is wet. It’s like writing a scene where someone dries off after a shower and the author tells you the order she dries her body off in every single time. Or even just “she started by drying off her face” each time she dries off. Unless there’s something coming where Emory wringing out her hair is specifically important, to me it comes off as unnecessary repetition.

If it’s repetitive, no matter what it is, I’m going to notice.

Oh, and by the way, if you notice me being repetitive in my fiction (blog posts don’t count), please let me know. I’d like to fix it.