My Fear Of Repetition

Introduction

I have now written over a thousand Vocal stories, it is not anything special, Vocal doesn't give you a bonus for it, and it is something that anyone can do. The recent “Haiku” challenges was an opportunity to create hundreds of Vocal Stories , but I think I entered two senryū and five haiku (even though Vocal did not specify that a true haiku requires a season and a cutting word to change the flow of the poem), but I reached that number with my usual output.

But The Problem Is

My thousand stories, when I look at my Vocal Stats, run to over a hundred pages. Each page in there often overwrites statistics for stories with already reported stories and there is no way to guarantee finding the statistics for a particular story, so often I do not know the statistics for my newer stories.

As I look through these flawed statistics I see stories that I have written and I think that I was considering writing a story about that, but it looks like I have already written a story covering that particular situation.

I then start to worry that something I have already written and published is a repetition of a previous story. In the case of reviews of films and music it is unlikely I would do the same review twice, but when it is on the state of something I am worried that I forget that I have already commented on the said situation.

As I get older sometimes my short term memory is terrible and I have to go back to get the information that I took five minutes ago and has then wiped from my mind. The real oddity is that I can often remember stuff vividly from as far back as my pre teenage years. This is probably just part of the human condition.

How Do I Deal With This?

I tend to think that although articles may cover things that I have covered before, if I do write about something once more, it will be a current view on the situation and the previous post the view on the situation at the time, so the fact I worry about repeating myself, is that I am not repeating myself, but stating my current position on the situation.

I am really sorry if that sounded very convoluted or even doesn’t make sense, but I feel that we can write in the now even if we have written similar stories in the past.

I also worry if some of my fiction and poems are repeated although a lot of the themes that I use as an inspiration for them are repeated, such as love, nature, dystopia and fear so it’s not surprising that the fear resurfaces for me, and may even do for others. Don’t let it stop you from creating, I won’t let it stop me.

I suppose part of it is vaguely related to imposter syndrome. You can’t come up with anything original so you are just repeating the rubbish that you posted before. I do sometimes think that about my work, especially sometimes on single lines of poetry.

Conclusion

I will keep writing and assume that what I write is relevant at the point in time that I actually write it. As creators we cannot worry that we are repeating ourselves, and in that I think of the music of AC/DC in which almost every song of theirs is very similar to every other song of theirs but is always consistently brilliant. Maybe I should think like AC/DC more to try and ensure readability.

I am going to share Rick Astley’s unexpectedly brilliant take on AC/DCs “Highway To Hell” a song that I sang live a few times myself which you can see here on Facebook with me looking even fatter than I am now.