How to make my story structure less repetitive?
Someone told me that the way I write is almost like I'm writing from a template, how do I break away from this?
I always end up with this: Saying what the person is doing in the present tense, mentioning something about surroundings, explore their past or the object/place's past.
All I'm trying to do is set up a scene, how can I do this differently?
Example of my writing:
Gabrielle wakes up to the sound of her phone’s loud beeping alarm. Yawning, she rolls onto her back and sits up, rubbing the crust out of her eyes. She begrudgingly pats down her nightstand until she finds her phone, quickly unlocking it and silencing the alarm. The clock says six thirty in the morning, she has to wake up early from now on, the job demands it.
Another one where I found the same problem:
Gabrielle walks out of her apartment and feels the coldness of the outside hit her, she shivers and walks down the path to the driveway, gets into her white car and drives up to Crayla Town. It used to be something else before 2023, just a bunch of industrial, process and packaging plants and warehouses, but the flooding and proceeding mudslide irreparably damaged all of it, so they built a town over it. She can’t believe she got a job at one of the most prestigious hospitals in the entire Pacific Northwest, one of the doctors that works there, Dr. Gage is the one that hired her, he is always finding new cures to all kinds of diseases, and finds new remedies for mutations of diseases that could no longer be treated by antibiotics
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/30083. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
3 answers
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Set up your POV:
Omnipotent: Knows everything already, and isn't constrained by the limits of time and space.
First person: Focuses on one person, it tells everything through their eyes and leaves out things they don't know, but it's subjective as heck.
Third person: You walk around, following the hero(es), but don't need to be subjective about stuff.
Changing: You change POVs at a given structure level. Might or might not qualifies you as a lazy hooligan, especially if you break the flow by saying "John Doe's POV".
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How our brains work:
We associate stuff with other stuff. This connection might be logical or illogical.
Give the information scattered, and bring up stuff when it gets into a character'smind, and is important enough, but being important is enough for third person.
If the world is damn complex, then you can still use child characters, "I got teleported here from our world" characters, and "I have amnesia" characters (that one has the benefits of losing normal memory, but not stuff like muscle-memory), and the Encyclopedia Exposita, a book that was might or might not been written by enraged neckbeards, and contains everything you need to know about the world.
- Voice: different writers tend to have different voices, and thus, different "personalities", that might or might not correlate with their real-life ones. For instance:
J.R.R. Tolkien: Feels like if grandpa was telling a tale.
C.S. "Multilaser" Goto: A sadistic chaos spawn, who enjoys torturing Eldars and falls into coma (,) if he can't write down the word: "Multilaser" in the next page of his current "book".
I also have my own: descriptions that are strictly self-contained and allow no room for creativity, offensive jokes are played up to the extreme (funny), attempts (and fails) at following pre-established guidelines, abhors the use of metaphors, as (he thinks) it drops the reader out of the story, if you write: "her legs were noodles", so replaces them with a metric load of verbs.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/30132. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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I think you are being too visual and too step-by-step; hoping to create an image / screenplay in the reader's head. But even in the movies, every second of film counts: This scene would be three lines in a movie and about two seconds each.
The ALARM; Gabrielle wakes up; grimaces, closes her eyes. Beat. She opens them and vaults out of bed."
CUT TO: She opens the door [dressed for winter and work]. Exhaling with a sigh of frozen breath she surveys the ice on the steps, and pulls her coat closer.
CUT TO: Gabrielle enters the building, removing her coat. The receptionist looks up, friendly and expectant.
DIALOGUE
Call these WAKING, STEPS, ENTRANCE: Even this would be too much if the cold (or Gabrielle's irritation with it) has no effect on the story. ENTRANCE could be removed: After STEPS, Gabrielle is just IN her new office and somebody walks in. The STEPS could be removed: A 2-second WAKING followed by Gabrielle IN-OFFICE and somebody walks in. ALL OF IT can be removed:
GABRIELLE: "That sounds perfect." / BOSS: "Excellent, see you tomorrow. Seven sharp." / GABRIELLE smiles and nods, hiding giddiness. / FADE OUT, FADE IN. / GABRIELLE is seated in her new office, an over-sized digital clock on her cubicle wall reads 7:02. BOSS walks in, irritated. "Shit, seven oh two. Sorry I'm late, it was unavoidable. Let's get started."
Of course in a novel this can be a little bit longer. Gabrielle might be thinking that ugly clock is the first thing to go, and then after her boss leaves, regard that clock with a silent exhale and whisper, I guess we're getting married, clock.
Every element you write should serve a purpose that matters later in the story. I added a hint of the Boss's obsessive punctuality; I can use that to pressure Gabrielle (or him) into something later. Or at least it is a character quirk I can use repeatedly to make him unique in the reader's mind.
[As Mark noted] you are including details that do not matter to the story. To get out of your formula; I suggest a different formulaic approach that won't be evident on the page. Prioritize!
At every scene closure, go through all your characters in the story. What is each one of them going to do next? What is the next decision for them, or the next event that happens to them? Is it time for them to accomplish something, or to fail at something? What do they feel? What do they want?
Go through all of them. Then pick which is most immediate, which is most important, which one takes another little step that changes something in the reader's mind. That is your next scene. In the story, time may have passed, so after that scene do it again.
In the hijack of your story above (without much knowledge!) I decided the next important thing after Gabrielle gets the job is discovering her new boss is sincerely irritated with himself for being two minutes late, which has some obvious future implications for her and the job she needs.
If I wanted this to actually be a problem for her; I can go back to earlier scenes and show Gabrielle being casually late, oversleeping, losing track of time, etc. Because then those details would not be banal or meaningless. They are character development that really matters to the plot.
I sometimes use the same priority device for conversations; especially in a group. In my notes, everybody has something to say or ask, and I figure out what it is: The person(s) that speak next are the ones with the most important thing to offer or ask.
I sometimes use the same priority device for describing settings: What is the most important thing about this environment? In Gabrielle's office, the over-sized clock. Not her chair, the lighting, or the hook where she hung her coat. In some other story, it might be a high-capacity shredder in every office, or cameras focused on a screen bolted into position, or two separate phones on a small desk.
Some settings just don't matter: a cubicle is a cubicle, any effect it has on the story line is just because cubicles provide very little privacy (or some are larger than others, or more conveniently located, or higher-ranked, etc, then elements that matter get described).
Other elements can matter, too. Atmosphere can set reader expectations; details can matter without the reader realizing they matter. Settings can reflect emotions, too: Confessing your love on the banks of a crystal river on a clear autumn day is different than confessing your love in a gritty city alleyway, or confessing your love in a spotlessly sterile hospital waiting room.
So when I say things must matter I mean they must have an effect on the plot, on a character's decisions, or on the reader, even if that effect is not consciously recognized by the reader.
One such thing (the reader may not notice) is character details that keep bit part characters from becoming too anonymous. They may not have an effect on the plot, but serve to keep sketched characters distinct in the reader's mind.
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The first issue I see here is not that the writing is repetitive but that the details are banal. That is, they are bits of everyday life that happen to everyone. They are repetitive or everyday life without telling us anything specific or vivid about your character of your story.
Yes, sometimes your characters live banal lives and do banal things, but detailing them just makes the writing tedious. This is the time to tell rather than show. If you cannot skip the banal parts of their life altogether, state them as briefly as possible and get on to the parts of the story that are vivid and distinct.
The details you want in a story are the "telling details", the details that tell a story for themselves, the details that bring a hundred other details rushing into the reader's head. Some of the most vivid passages in literature are very brief, but they make excellent use of telling details to highlight the exceptional in a vivid way.
Focus on what is vivid and original in your story, not what is routine and banal and the feeling of repetition is likely to disappear of its own accord.
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