Use purposeful repetition to create meaning
Summary: You can strategically pair repetition and variation to illustrate character change and escalation of stakes.
“Shakespeare is fond of repeating a motive to heighten effects . . . in Romeo and Juliet, the repetition of the deed with fatal result works as well through consonance as through contrasted treatment.”
— Gustav Freytag (FreytagMovement and Rise of the Action section)
A few years ago, I was on a business trip. I worked in a building whose east side and west side were mirrors of each other. However, there was one rather significant difference: the men’s restroom was on the left and and women’s on the right on one side of the building, but on the other side, their locations were were reversed. You can probably see where this is going. More than once, I nearly walked into the wrong restroom.
I have no idea what motivated the building’s architecture. Perhaps the restrooms were mapped that way to make it easier to do the building’s plumbing. Repetition for engineering reasons like that (or even aesthetic considerations) can be good.
However, that shouldn’t come at the expense of functionality or comprehensibility. As a designer, I’m always concerned with how people will use objects, not just how to build them or how they look. We must craft experiences to fit the way human brains work.
In the previous note, I argued that you should make your turning points distinct. If they look too much like each other, it can feel to your audience like they’re wandering lost in a forest and keep coming across a suspiciously familiar-looking oak tree. “Are we going in circles?”
Your audience members need a way to orient themselves in your story, to have a sense of their current location and their progress on the journey. If the landmarks all look the same, it robs them of this “sense of place.” They’ll get confused and head for the exit.
But there’s an obvious counterargument to this claim: What about Harold Ramis’ 1993 film, Groundhog Day, and other stories that hinge on repetition? Do these stories invalidate the hypothesis?
I don’t think so. And the answer for “Why not?” gives us some useful insight.
It’s all about meaning
Our minds are pattern-recognition machines. (CronPage 131) Whenever a pattern repeats, it invites our brains to make a comparison. We almost can’t help but to look at the two instances and evaluate them for differences. And from those differences, we create meaning.
The key is that those differences serve a structural purpose. Unlike the building on my business trip, the repetition here isn’t just aesthetic. It’s functional.
Groundhog Day’s premise has Bill Murray’s character experiencing the same external events over and over. In scene-sequel language, we could say that there’s a repetition of the same disasters. (Although, of course, there’s variation from one iteration to the next.)
But the way Murray’s character responds is different. He makes different choices, and the audience gets to see different results from those decisions.
This points us to a classic pattern to demonstrate character change. At the end of your story, confront your protagonist with the same disaster she faced at the beginning. But have her make a different choice. This “bookends” your character transformation with nice “before” and “after” shots that show how she’s grown. (SnyderPage 72) (VoglerPage 251) Groundhog Day merely extends that variation in character action to fill the bulk of the story. A
Groundhog Day thus doesn’t deny the theory. It adds nuance. You can repeat the disasters as long as the decisions are different. And in those different responses, you create meaning for your audience members.
It helps them see that they’re not wandering lost in the forest. Together with your protagonist, they’re making progress.
Second verse, same as the first
What if it’s not the disasters but the decisions that are the same? In this case, make the disasters different. Use this to illustrate when your protagonist refuses to change.
It’s a pattern you can exploit through your second act. You throw increasingly challenging disasters at your protagonist, but she stubbornly holds onto her old way of being. Only at the recommitment does she finally embrace a different approach.
But take care to make the disasters sufficiently varied. In Truby’s words, “you want plot development, not repetition . . . Don’t keep hitting the same plot beat.” (TrubyPage 291)
In this way, your audience can sense progress through the differences in the external disasters even while the internal character remains the same.
Together, they tell a story
Bring together these two patterns for intentional repetition of disasters and decisions, and you can use them to illustrate your protagonist’s character story.
- You show her making the same decision when facing different disasters to show how she’s stuck.
- You show her making different decisions when facing the same disasters to demonstrate how she’s changed.
| Act | Disaster | Decision |
|---|---|---|
| I | 1 |
A |
| II A | 2 |
A |
| II B | 3 |
A |
| III | 1 |
B |
Other types of repetition
What about repeating disasters that don’t affect the core character story? Can that be useful?
It’s certainly possible. You could use repetition of the same kind of disaster but with increasing stakes to create a sense of progress. This is the underlying pattern with the rule of three and other escalating series structures.
It’s the pattern you see with the deaths of the characters in horror movies or the reveal of clues in a mystery. Again, the key here is that the repetition of the pattern establishes a link, but then crucial variations help the audience understand where they are in the story.
In Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film, Jurassic Park, for example, there are three on-screen character deaths. All of them happen in the jungle, so there’s a challenge with how to keep things interesting. Crichton, Koepp, and Spielberg inject variation by having different dinosaurs perform the deed and by finding small but distinctive ways to alter the setting.
| Character | Distinctives |
|---|---|
| Genarro | T-Rex, rainy night, on the toilet |
| Nedry | Dilophosaurus, rainy night, in jeep by runoff waterfall |
| Muldoon | Velociraptors, day, clearing outside bunker |
Use repetition with purpose in your own stories
The key to all this is to pair repetition with variation in order to serve a function. If you don’t have a particular thing you’re trying to get across, always aim for variety.
But you don’t need to avoid repetition in every case. You can use it as a tool to achieve specific outcomes, like illustrating character change or building a pattern of escalating stakes.
The trick is that whether you’re using variety alone or repetition with variation, do it with purpose. You don’t want your readers “wandering into the wrong restroom” because you didn’t think through the implications. Inject distinctives that support the functions of your external disasters and internal character decisions.
That reinforces your story. It helps your audience have a sense of place and progress. And they’ll thank you for it.
Onward!
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