Novel Do you ever get deja vu when writing a novel?

I think I might just be going mad, but when you revise or read back on a draft, do you kick yourself that you have written exactly the same thing twice! Or two of your characters have very similar traits?


I know its only a draft and I can change this, but is it normal to repeat stuff? I use note books and so I'm constantly looking at old ideas and then end up re-using stuff, I think of it as a kind of 'greatest hits' way of editing my work lol

 

I definitely notice this in my own writing.

I think it happens when there's something trying to work it's way into the story so strongly that it sneaks in through multiple places. To me, this is a sign that whatever element has come in repetitively is important, whether I've noticed so consciously or not.

So then when trying to cut the repetition and combining the best of it into a single element, I also try to increase the weight and prominence that one element (whether it's character traits, plot elements, or whatever) has in the story.

 

This is actually something that has never happened to me.

 

No, actually, I've never experienced this.

 

If I leave something for a long time without working on it, I may think I need to go back to it and write a certain passage, only to realize that I've already done it. But there's nothing mystical in it, I just forgot what I had written and what still needed to be written.

It's easy, when working on a large project (like a novel) over a long period of time, to encounter this kind of problem. You just forget where you left off.

 

I normally do that to, is write the same idea of my novel. But this doesn't mean that I keep all the same scene in the new draft. Sometimes I change the scenes around and change POVs. I don't know if I use the same exact ideas in the third draft though, but I use the same character description and apply them to my novel. It seems that after every re-writes, the ideas change gradually, but that doesn't mean that the central premise is completly drift away.

 

I've had this a couple of times but never to a large extent. Sometimes the same thing happens twice in one paragraph though @_@

 

Yup I know I wrote the same short story 3 or 4 times, City, Character Different, Plot pretty the same

 

This happens quite a bit for me, mostly intentionally. I mostly just do it for how characters interact though. When I give up on one idea I convert the best aspects into a format which will fit a better book. I'm thinking eventually I'll have a huge amount of 'greatest hits' ideas for character interactions in a single cohesive book.