Mentioning quickly repeated events in first person?
When writing in first person, is it better to mention as little repetition of events as possible? Or can it improve writing in some cases to have a character duplicate previous events and have them mentioned by the writer?
For example, would it be better to have something like,
"I drew my hand back and gave three sharp knocks on the wood. No answer. I knocked again. Nothing. Not sure whether or not to be worried, I knocked again."
or,
"I drew my hand back and gave three sharp knocks on the wood. I received no answer but continued to knock; I grew worried quickly from the lack of response."
In either example the character is repeatedly knocking, but in only one is the knocking mentioned similarly throughout the example.
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In your first example, you allow the reader to experience, together with the character, the waiting for an answer and the wondering why nobody opens the door. Each time your character knocks, there's waiting, anticipation, build-up of tension. In your second example, you gloss over those experiments. In your first example, you're showing. In the second - you're telling.
This would be true in third person as much as in first person, by the way.
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I knocked several times but no one answered.
No more than that. Any emotional response to knocking and getting no answer has to be set up in advance. Show us that a reply was expected. Show us that much depends on the reply. Show us that the lack of a reply is a sign of great peril. Then just say,
I knocked several times but no one answered.
If you have set it up correctly, we feel all the emotions that attend that event, and we know the character feels them too.
Emotions are like jokes. You have to set them up right so that the punchline can be simple and direct. The simple direct punchline allows the whole joke, the whole emotion to hit us at once. Emotions, like laugher, are sudden. They are triggered by the right word or action in the right circumstances. You can't build them from scratch in the reporting of an event. You can't create them by reporting them at all.
Whenever a scene feels forced or labored, the cause is always the same. The writer is trying to generate in the moment the emotions that they should have set up previously so that they could trigger them in the moment. There is no way to fix scenes like this except by going back and doing the setup properly.
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I'll agree with Ash, but it depends on the situation. In this one, the events/actions are not a foregone conclusion. If your character is sawing wood or tightening a bolt or having sex or doing anything where repeated action is expected by the reader, detailing the repeated actions gets boring.
Edit in response to comment. On repetitiveness in sex:
I have no problem with either explicit sex scenes or pages of it; but after more than one or two descriptions of thrusting, licking, caresses or orgasms it becomes comical. What extremist metaphor comes next? (pun intended).
My recommendation for writing such scenes is to read and revise them fifty times in a row, or however long it takes to dissipate any arousal they offer the author, to actually be bored reading them so they can be seen objectively, and cut to their essentials to do their job. Even if their job is to titillate, removing repetition here is like removing repetition in prose or dialogue; more concision and originality is needed to prevent the reader from just skipping to the end.
The sex is in the minds of the characters. There is an arc to a sex scene that does not end with physical climax. Sex is about bonding. Creating one, affirming one, damaging or breaking one, with the partner or a third party off stage (e.g. a wife cheating on her husband). In the case of casual sex, it affirms a characters lack of bonds in her/his life, or the weakness of their social bonds. Or sex can signify submission (willing or coerced), oppression (e.g. rape), or a willingness to flout societal standards: All of these involve emotional bonds. Whatever the bond is, finalizing the nature of it, or the transformation of it, is the climax of the sex scene, and it probably does not coincide with the release of fluids. Again, even if the point is titillation or fan service; nothing we write should be completely excisable from the story. Sex scenes should both BE consequences and HAVE consequences in the characters or in how we understand them.
That is why a sex scene can be long and accomplish something. Not because it is full of repetition; but because it is changing somebody, or is the culmination of a change, and that deserves some attention.
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