More Kristin Nelson for you.  In her next blog post on beginning writer mistakes, she talked about reiterating already known information for the sake of new characters and too much conversation.  Sounds kind of long, doesn’t it?  Her post isn’t but I have a tendency of making them longer.  I apologize now since I’m not at peak performance thanks to a surprise re-occurrence of some rather painful, mystery stomach issues.  Fun.

Writers tend to fall into the habit of reiterating information that characters in the world would already know in order to bring the reader in on the goods.  I believe I talked about this in the first Writer Mistakes post.  There are better ways to expose readers to necessary information than “you know, Bob” moments but in that same vein, writers can also get sucked into the same thing for the sake of a newly emerging character.  The reader already knows what’s going on yet they’re made to sit through a recap of events they just read because a character is late to the game.  Don’t make them do this.

Just as there are a million and one ways to bring the reader into the story, there are just as many to bring other characters in.  They ran into so-and-so on the way to whatever-place or they had a prophetic dream that told all.  Or even the very simple, “Sha-na-na rolled out the events for Doo-ron-ron and the more details she gave, the lower his face dropped.”  In cases like this, it’s OK to glaze over details since the reader already has them.  Repetition is best saved for something like jump rope.  Leave it out of your stories.  If people wanted to read the same thing over and over again, make it be your book as a whole, not just one scene repeated 10 times.

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