How Much Do Readers Care About Repetition?

Hi. It’s Hannah. A man, by the way. A man with a beard.

Is there anything more disappointing as a reader and a writer then reading a book that you can’t talk about? Because that’s been my reality for the past few weeks.

In this week’s *cough* it was supposed to be last week, but I had to shift the articles to this week *cough* Friday: Fun With Reading, we examine how much readers care about the things that irk writers.

I recently got into a “new” excursion.

The genre isn’t new to me. I made $20,000 from scenes of the specific nature alone in a single year, actually, in just a couple of months, a few years ago. I made a further few $100,000 from a closely related genre.

But now I’m tackling things in a new avenue. A new medium, a new location, a place where people expect one thing, and I have to follow that one thing by seeing what the competition is doing.

Yes, I’ve been reading nothing but gay erotica for the past three weeks, and I am incredibly disappointed that I cannot talk about it.

I’d rather be reviewing the hunchback of Notre Dame which I’m rereading, the dragon book (I forget the name) which I’m reading, and a new book that I just bought. But no, I’ve been reading nothing but gay porn, and instead of reviewing the individual stories, I’m going to review what irks me about it.

Erotica is annoying.

In the erotic I’m reading, every author’s book that I read, is full of irritating repetition. It says “cock” twice per line. It says “fat cock” three times in a paragraph. There are lines that appear in every single book by one author, to the point that it’s almost predictable, and I hate it.

As a writer, staying fresh is important to me. I cannot use the same word twice in one sentence unless I’m doing it for emphasis or style. It looks sloppy if I say cock three times in a row.

Using the same line in every book is something I would only do in a series if I wanted to connect something, connect events or characters, and it’s not something I’d do in a bunch of unrelated shorts. I would, and do, find a unique way to say it.

At the same time, I love it.

I love that this is so easy. You can publish badly-written erotica, and readers will still like it if it turns them on. The writing can be dull and flat. Or it can be descriptive. It can be anything you want.

It’s interesting as an erotica reader, because you never know what you’re going to get. One day I read what could only be a 10,000 word masterpiece, a badly written but somewhat intriguing piece of about 9,000 words, and something that looked like it was written by an illiterate robot that’s never read a real book.

The repetition irritates me as a writer, but as a reader, I’m not sure I mind.

Personally I find reading erotica for its intended purposes repulsive, so I can’t talk about how reading it feels in that regard. I can only talk about it from a “hey, a story, let’s read” perspective.

When I’m immersed in a story, I don’t notice the repetition, and I think that’s great. I love the fact that the average reader isn’t going to care about this stuff, and I like that I, when not immersed in the story, do. It’s interesting to see how the reader vs the writer thinks.

While reading as a writer, it can be difficult to actually enjoy the work, so it takes a good author to get you immersed enough that you don’t realise this stuff is going on.

I wish I had a book to review this week, but as I said, I’ve been reading pretty much nothing but erotica.

I need to take a break from it so I can finish the dragon book that I’m currently reading, and I won’t be reviewing Notre Dame. It’s a classic. Nobody needs another review of a classic, unless that review will be contraversial.

So, yes. This has just been a short piece, but it is interesting to think about.

It makes me think about how writers are such perfectionists, but the reality is, a lot of readers don’t care as much. It’s just the ones that leave reviews that‘ll care. The ones that leave reviews are the ones who have something to say, have opinions, and arereally dedicated to reading a good book that is both well written and interesting to them.

The rest of the people are just sheep who don’t seem to care that their favourite author uses the same phrase in every book or the same phrase in every paragraph.

Like that.

The same phrase in every …

Heh.