The Power of Repetition: When to Return and When to Let Go
Series: Sound & Rhythm in Writing - Writing to the Beat (Rhythm and Resonance)
Writers are always being warned away from repetition. Don’t repeat yourself. Don’t use the same word twice. Don’t echo ideas, don’t restate, don’t circle back.
But here’s the truth: repetition is one of the oldest, most powerful tools we have. Ask any preacher. Any poet. Any political speechwriter. Repetition isn’t redundancy—it’s rhythm. It’s resonance.
Used carelessly, it dulls the ear. But used with intention, it makes the sentence reverberate long after it ends.
Let’s start here:
Think of the things you say when you’re desperate, or grieving, or in love. You don’t say them once. You say them again and again, slightly different each time, as if repetition could make the feeling more real, or hold it in place.
Language is how we try to hold the world still. Repetition is how we try to make it stay.
Writers instinctively repeat what matters. The trick is learning to listen to your own echoes—and knowing when to keep them and when to cut.
How to Use Repetition with Intention
Use Repetition as Emotional Undercurrent
Repetition reveals what your subconscious is circling. It’s the word you didn’t mean to write three times. The image that keeps coming back. That’s not a mistake—it’s a signal.
Highlight the words or images that recur in your draft. Ask yourself what they’re trying to say beneath the plot. You’ve heard “cut repeated words.” But try asking why they came back. Repetition often points to the story under the story. The one you didn’t know you were telling yet.
Let Repetition Build Like Music
Think of a chorus in a song—not just a repeat, but a return. With each pass, the meaning shifts. The stakes rise. The repetition becomes its own rhythm.
Try writing a paragraph where one phrase repeats every few lines. Change only the context. See how the meaning shifts. This goes beyond emphasis. This is layering. Think of it as cumulative weight—each echo adding volume, emotional force, pressure.
Break the Pattern to Create Impact
Repetition only works because of contrast. A series of echoes, and then—nothing. The sentence that doesn’t repeat lands with force because it resists the rhythm you’ve built.
If you’ve used repetition for a whole section, try ending it with a sentence that breaks the form entirely. No echo. Just stillness. This is the writer’s version of a rest in music. The silence is part of the rhythm. What’s withheld matters as much as what returns.
Use Syntactic Repetition as Structure
Parallel structure—those almost-identical sentences or clauses—isn’t just pleasing to the ear. It creates scaffolding. It holds the reader steady while the meaning deepens.
Write a passage that begins with the same phrase across multiple lines. Vary only the endings. Let structure be your container. This isn’t filler. It’s form as feeling. When the content gets slippery, let repetition give the reader something to hold on to.
Repeat at the Sentence Level, but Revise at the Paragraph Level
You can repeat a word. You can echo a structure. But when you zoom out, make sure you’re not just stalling. Repetition should spiral, not stall. It should deepen, not flatten.
Read your paragraph aloud and ask: is each repetition doing new work? If not, cut or rewrite. Let rhythm rise, not loop in place. It’s the difference between obsession and redundancy. One pulls the reader closer. The other lets them drift.
Creative Connections
Flash Fiction: Kathy Fish’s “Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild”
Fish uses repetition as a structural spine—each line begins with a variation of “a group of...” But what starts as playful taxonomy quickly turns somber, political, elegiac. The repetition becomes a kind of drumbeat, transforming a linguistic convention into emotional crescendo. That’s the power of intentional repetition: it organizes feeling, intensifies it, and then breaks your heart with it.
Dance & Music: Pina Bausch’s The Rite of Spring
Bausch’s choreography is all compulsion and pattern. One gesture—reaching, falling—repeated, repeated, repeated until it cracks open into something unbearable. Repetition becomes tension. Tension becomes transformation. That’s the goal.
Invitation to Play
Take a sentence or phrase from your own writing—something that feels charged or strange. Now write it again. And again. Change something small each time: a verb, a detail, the direction of the sentence.
Let the phrase evolve.
Let it echo.
Let it fall apart or grow teeth or come back to you in disguise.
Write it until the repetition becomes the story.
Try it. See what happens when you let the echo lead.
About Me
I’m Rena—a writer, educator, and relentless explorer of stories. Originally from Southern California, I’ve spent the past 20 years making my home in Costa Rica, where I live with my husband, two children, and a pair of Rhodesian Ridgebacks who refuse to acknowledge their size.
My writing has appeared in places like Brevity Magazine, South Florida Poetry Journal, Five on the Fifth, New Flash Fiction Review, Headland Literary Journal, and more. Along the way, I’ve collected more rejection letters than I care to count—a badge of honor for any writer chasing the next story.
At my core, I believe in the power of ideas, in listening for what’s unsaid, and in finding beauty in the unexpected. Stories connect us—and together, I believe, we’re better.
Come write, wonder, and explore with me.