Beware of Trend Echoing!

One hopeless struggle that we writers face is to make our writing as fresh and vivid as possible. Why is it such a losing game? The short answer can be found in Ecclesiastes 1:9 as follows, "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun."

The long answer involves several insidious influences that make us decide to resort to clichés. We might be impatient, lazy, and writing-while-only-half-aware. Or maybe we've drifted into trend echoing.

Trend echoing especially afflicts those writers who are well-read. We might be trying to improve our craft, or enjoy some escapism, or both. We either read for breadth, sampling a little from a lot of genres, or we read for depth, covering everything in our own genre. Either way, we have to watch out for trend echoing.

Here at Obsidianbookshelf.com, I can point out the typical rise of a trend in fiction. It starts when a writer introduces something that feels new. She rediscovers a beautiful word that has fallen from use. She puts together everyday words to form an unusual expression.

Or – in m/m romance – someone writes a story that features a new detail about sex between males that we women wouldn't know first-hand. Upon reading it, we all grab this detail and start repeating it in our own sex scenes.

This is trend echoing. Something quasi-new catches on, gets borrowed, and then gets run into the ground. It must be especially frustrating for the first writer who kicked off the trend. Suddenly her hard work gets lost in the echoes.

It has drawbacks, especially if done to excess, for the imitators who settle for borrowing wordage that is already losing its edge. A good writer needs to find her own voice. She should stretch sometimes to put a new spin on things just so that she can build the mental muscle to be creative.

But sometimes we're clobbered by deadlines and have to crank that fiction out. So, consciously or unconsciously, we borrow that way-cool phrase we read somewhere so we can get something described and move on. It's harmless to re-use a word or a detail, right? Sure, for the most part. No one can copyright a re-discovered word or a new detail about m/m sex.

When it happens on a grand scale, it can get stale for the readers. Certain overly poetic words get repeated into the ground. My favorite examples are the verbs limn and lave.

Limn means to depict through painting or drawing. It infected the literary fiction world in the 1990s and continues to pop up in sentences about light touching faces. Lave means to wash or bathe, and gets used constantly in erotic writing about oral sex.

It's like – whoa! There's that word again! If fiction were a drinking game and we all had to do a shot whenever we encountered limn or lave, we'd all be unconscious in no time.

Worse than repeating single words is mindless imitation of something bigger like a character type without understanding the original context. For example, take the urban fantasy heroine of today.

She got started in 1993 with the first Laurell K. Hamilton book, Guilty Pleasures. Here at Obsidianbookshelf.com, I remember that Anita Blake had a good reason for her tough, cynical attitude: she came from the horror genre and happened to be completely outmatched by the predators that she hunted. In other words, she was living on borrowed time.

Today's urban fantasy heroine is in a different place because the genre has shifted from horror to romantic comedy. She has a cute life, job, and boyfriend – and the snotty attitude makes no sense at all. I mean, what does she have to complain about?

Earlier I said that trend echoing happens to the well-read. Reading a lot can also save us from trend echoing – if we're paying attention. We will notice the overly repeated words. We'll realize when changes in the genre invalidate blind imitation. All it takes is awareness when we re-read our own material. [I don't allow my blog posts to be copied in full. Please click here to see how to use an excerpt/blurb.]