In the last few days, I've seen a lot of discussion of international speculative fiction, where to find it, who writes it, etc. See Charles Tan here, Nick Mamatas here, for example. Although I started composing this post before that discussion got fully launched, I think it is relevant to that discussion, because it addresses the discrimination and injustice that surrounds the concept of native speakers, both in verbal speech contexts, teaching contexts, and in sf/f writing. And who knows? You might even find some situations here to give you worldbuilding or story inspiration while we're at it.
I'm sure you know the term "native speaker." Someone who speaks a language natively is someone who's grown up in a place where a particular language is spoken and thus has learned it when they were first learning language. I'm a native speaker of English, for example. I have friends who are native speakers of many languages: Urdu, Japanese, French, Spanish... the list goes on. Your book might contain native speakers of these world languages, or one (or more) of your own making.
For a person learning a foreign language, the idea of a native speaker takes on additional importance. The native speaker is the goal. "Nativelike" language use is defined as the pinnacle of success. Along with this comes the idea that you need to have a native speaker as a teacher, because otherwise how will you hear the language you're learning as it's really spoken in its country of origin? Indeed, if you learned it from someone who was once a student like you, wouldn't that be learning it halfway? Or would it?
Be careful. The biggest myth about native speakers of any language is that they are infallible.
Native speakers aren't infallible - just look around the writing boards and you'll be able to watch native speakers of English agonize over what a pain in the neck spelling is, or grammar. They'll argue on and on about one usage or another. (They're entitled to - which is something I'll come back to later.)
I remember when I was learning French. It was a second language for me, though I was still a toddler when I started learning it. I put a lot of effort into my learning. I wanted to be good at it, to speak with native speakers - an admirable goal that really is much of what language learning is all about. One day I got a letter from a pen pal in France, and it had spelling errors in it. I couldn't believe my eyes. Wow, people in France might not always spell French correctly? Well, when you think about it, of course it makes sense. People make spelling errors all the time, native language or no.
If you think about the concept of native-speakerhood from the point of view of language variability (and also world languages), you could argue that there is no one single English that everyone learns. The English one learns depends on what varieties of English one is exposed to. Does that include a particular dialect? Does it also include the standardized English of the news, and of the schools? What about engineering or medical terminology? What about literature? And - let's push that one a little further - what about science fiction and fantasy literature? Each of these sources is going to provide different kinds, complexities, and flavors of English.
The plot thickens when we take the myth of native speaker infallibility and turn it around. The faulty assumption of native speaker infallibility implies an equally faulty assumption of non-native speaker fallibility. This second myth is so powerful that it is used to invalidate the language use of learners all over the world.
Here's a relatively harmless example. When I was living in Japan I could never tell jokes. Things like puns sprang out at me but if I ever tried to use them for humor, people wouldn't laugh. They wouldn't even look confused and fail to get it. They would say, "No, no, no, you have it all wrong," and launch into a language lesson. I was making the joke precisely because I had already learned that lesson. But because I was a non-native speaker, the automatic conclusion was that it wasn't a joke at all, but a mistake.
Here's a subtle example that I think you might recognize, if you're a highly proficient second or third (etc.) language speaker. I have trouble getting my French friends to correct my usage because they understand me. If you accept effective communication as sufficient for a non-native speaker, you're not likely to help someone tune their language to become more accurate and articulate.
And here's an example that made me so angry that I didn't like myself. I started studying Japanese as my major in college, and then spent two years living in Japan studying it intensively. So when I came back to the US, I looked for Japanese teaching jobs. I taught first- and second-year Japanese at a California high school for one year and helped lead a trip to Japan with the school baseball team. The following year I moved to another school where I taught Japanese to 6-8th graders. At each of these schools I was the sole teacher of Japanese and in complete charge of my curriculum and activities, testing, etc. Then, after I began my Ph.D. program to study Education (and the teaching of Japanese in particular), I taught Japanese for one semester as part of a team run by native-speaking teachers of Japanese. Everything changed. We team-taught the classes so no single teacher saw any one class more than twice a week. For non-natives, that was once a week. For at least the first four weeks of class, I and the other non-native teachers weren't allowed to correct our students' homework without having our own work checked by the native teachers, regardless of our previous experience. Not once in the course of that semester were we given responsibility to correct testing material without supervision. It was not a situation I felt I could continue in beyond the end of that semester.
In my dissertation I learned some interesting things when I compared native and non-native teachers. The teachers I studied were of Japanese, but I'm sure much of this would also apply to English. When it comes to pragmatics - the subtleties of representing social identity and politeness behavior - we aren't typically conscious of what we do. If someone describes a situation to you and asks you what you'd say, you won't typically say what you would say, but what you believe you should say - and those aren't always the same thing. I think you can see the difficulty for teaching contexts. Non-native teachers, however, are more conscious of what they do, which makes them a great resource for teaching students in this area which is so critical for social and linguistic success. My conclusion was (in quick simplified summary version) that teamwork between native and non-native speakers is ideal for learning.
This all leads me to the following conclusion: both non-native and native speaker perspectives on language have value. This isn't just true for language teaching, but for writing as well.
Non-native speakers of English writing in English will do interesting things with the language, because they don't have the same underlying experience of language sources that a native speaking writer has had. Trouble may of course arise, as when an expression is ambiguous and the writer isn't fully aware of that ambiguity. But the alternate language background makes it easier to avoid falling into cliché, and can bring a freshness to writing style the likes of which you won't see in the writing of a native speaker (who, when avoiding cliché, will achieve freshness of a different variety).
Yet these writers can still fall into the trap of the assumption of fallibility. My friend Aliette de Bodard, has a debut novel, Servant of the Underworld, that has just come out from Angry Robot books. One reviewer claimed that the qualities of her writing that he disliked could be explained by the fact that English was not her native language - and while most other reviewers praise her work enthusiastically, you can imagine that Aliette was highly insulted by this. It piqued my own indignation to such an extent that I began writing this post. Her science fiction and fantasy writing grow directly out of a long history of reading sf/f in English - a natural source for the wonderful English she uses, which is then augmented in flavor and originality both by her own creativity and her unique perspective on the English language. She is also very articulate in discussing her own cross-cultural and cross-linguistic experiences with writing, so go take a look at some of her thoughts, here.
Aliette is not alone. Indeed, she's following in some very famous footsteps. History is full of works - classics in fact - written in English by non-native speakers. One of the most famous is Lolita, written in English by the Russian Vladimir Nabokov. [Reviewed here (1958).] And then there's Heart of Darkness, written by Joseph Conrad, a native speaker of Polish (here's another article about him).
I can't say that I haven't unconsciously fallen into the trap of not "getting" a non-native speaker's jokes. But after having worn the shoes of a non-native speaker, and experienced some of the consequences, I know I always try to question my own unconscious assumptions about language use and proficiency.
I hope you also find this post has given you some interesting things to think about.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Productivity and the Muse
There are lots of reasons why a writer might feel discouraged. Rejection is a big one. Writer's block (or the phenomena that pass for it) might be another. I personally have a difficult time with productivity, or to be specific, how little of it I feel I have.
I'm not fair to myself. Does this sound familiar?
Writers have different writing styles, and they have different writing processes. My process happens to involve an enormous amount of background work for each story, followed by planning and scene-sketching - for the whole story if it's a short story, and for at least a section of several chapters if it's a novel. My plan can flex, but I like to know where I'm going.
Sometimes it's a good thing that I have lots of background work to do, because this kind of work is stuff I can do while I'm doing other things. And I have lots of other things to do. Typically I get three hours a day to write, five days a week. The hardest part is that I can't always count on having this time - unpredictable things like illness will derail my process for several days at a time.
I write scene by scene. When I have a draft, I get critique. I usually then have to take the draft apart on first revision and change something major (how major depends on the story). I write stories that go somewhere, that have character arcs for multiple characters. It takes me forever. I watch people around me talking about all their story submissions and/or acceptances and I know that's not something I'll be able to achieve for a number of years, or possibly ever. Even if my time goes up, I'm still not going to change into a flash fiction writer overnight.
I imagine though that other people experience different kinds of frustrations with their productivity. Like writing a whole bunch of stories and not having them land anywhere. Or having to trunk things because they don't know what to do with them or where to sell them.
The thing is, the Muse works differently for different people. I find if I try to change my style, I can't function at all. To some extent you have to go with that.
On the other hand, I have learned some things that help. One is that I've learned to keep my Muse awake - i.e. not to lose my drive and inspiration - by making sure to do at least one writing thing every day. That includes pulling out what I've written last and looking over sections of it. This makes it tons easier to resume what I was doing when the free time presents itself.
I also had some really great advice the other day from my friend Deborah Ross (of Darkover fame). I'll paraphrase what she said. She told me when you feel like your productivity is down, you may be counting the wrong kinds of progress. Getting a story finished is wonderful, but if that's the only kind of achievement that counts, you'll spend a lot of time frustrated. Just keeping the Muse awake should count as progress. Each sentence you write should count as progress. The important elements of worldbuilding and planning should not go unrecognized on the progress-meter either. All of these things contribute.
It was really good advice. I can't say I've stopped feeling frustrated by the unpredictability of my writing time, but counting progress differently has helped a lot - so just in case you've been feeling frustrated too, I thought I should pass this on.
I'm not fair to myself. Does this sound familiar?
Writers have different writing styles, and they have different writing processes. My process happens to involve an enormous amount of background work for each story, followed by planning and scene-sketching - for the whole story if it's a short story, and for at least a section of several chapters if it's a novel. My plan can flex, but I like to know where I'm going.
Sometimes it's a good thing that I have lots of background work to do, because this kind of work is stuff I can do while I'm doing other things. And I have lots of other things to do. Typically I get three hours a day to write, five days a week. The hardest part is that I can't always count on having this time - unpredictable things like illness will derail my process for several days at a time.
I write scene by scene. When I have a draft, I get critique. I usually then have to take the draft apart on first revision and change something major (how major depends on the story). I write stories that go somewhere, that have character arcs for multiple characters. It takes me forever. I watch people around me talking about all their story submissions and/or acceptances and I know that's not something I'll be able to achieve for a number of years, or possibly ever. Even if my time goes up, I'm still not going to change into a flash fiction writer overnight.
I imagine though that other people experience different kinds of frustrations with their productivity. Like writing a whole bunch of stories and not having them land anywhere. Or having to trunk things because they don't know what to do with them or where to sell them.
The thing is, the Muse works differently for different people. I find if I try to change my style, I can't function at all. To some extent you have to go with that.
On the other hand, I have learned some things that help. One is that I've learned to keep my Muse awake - i.e. not to lose my drive and inspiration - by making sure to do at least one writing thing every day. That includes pulling out what I've written last and looking over sections of it. This makes it tons easier to resume what I was doing when the free time presents itself.
I also had some really great advice the other day from my friend Deborah Ross (of Darkover fame). I'll paraphrase what she said. She told me when you feel like your productivity is down, you may be counting the wrong kinds of progress. Getting a story finished is wonderful, but if that's the only kind of achievement that counts, you'll spend a lot of time frustrated. Just keeping the Muse awake should count as progress. Each sentence you write should count as progress. The important elements of worldbuilding and planning should not go unrecognized on the progress-meter either. All of these things contribute.
It was really good advice. I can't say I've stopped feeling frustrated by the unpredictability of my writing time, but counting progress differently has helped a lot - so just in case you've been feeling frustrated too, I thought I should pass this on.
Monday, March 8, 2010
The writer's relationship to the reader
When you read a book, can you tell what the author is saying to you?
In academia, people tend to be very careful about making statements about authorial intent, especially when an author has been dead for over a hundred years. So they'll talk about the narrator and what the narrator says, or they'll talk about patterns in the text that might suggest different kinds of meanings.
For current writers, the question of a relationship to the reader is a complex one as well. It's better in some ways to figure that once a book or story is published, people will get what they want out of it, on the basis of their own experiences as readers, and this may not have much to do with what you intended - especially as it comes to reading your own reviews.
But whether or not we as writers have a particular message we want to get across (as discussed here in a related post), we DO want to have control over our stories - in particular, how the information in the story gets distributed so that the story is focused and its effect is maximized in the way we intend.
There are easy and hard ways to communicate with a reader. The easiest one is to appoint yourself the narrator and say things straight to the reader. That way, if you're Beatrix Potter, you can say:
"So that is the story of the two Bad Mice, but they were not so very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke."
or
"And besides - I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells - and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle!"
You might say that this isn't the writer speaking to us. Sure, it's not - just as I said above, it's the narrator. But the narrator appears to be using a voice like that of the author, and we might hazard a guess that the author used these devices to back us off the story, while also reassuring the reader about certain things. One thing seems clear to me in the second passage - that Beatrix Potter doesn't want entirely to leave children with the idea that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was only a hedgehog, but to leave them with a certain sense of wonder.
Direct narrator speaking to the reader isn't just about suddenly breaking into your narrative with discussion of "the story" and what "I" know about it. It occurs all the time in third person omniscient point of view, whenever the narrator describes something that isn't directly observable, or judgeable, by the point of view character.
And in fact, I think you could argue that there's another tool available to the writer using an omniscient narrator - since omniscient viewpoints zoom in and out, drawing closer or farther away from a particular character's judgment, the writer can choose to make these zooms, or not to, in order to control the amount and kind of information given to the reader.
Controlling the amount and kind of information given to the reader is how we keep the story under control, focused and moving forward. Keeping momentum and giving information about the progress of the main story conflict is critical. But so is providing world information so a reader doesn't get lost. That's where the problem of infodumping comes up. What is it but the problem of the writer "getting information across" to the reader? To make the story work, we have to decide what information is really critical for the reader to know.
As J. Kathleen Cheney noted in her post on description, sometimes stains on priest's hems or field-stripping of weapons appears to come into it. But why would we as authors want to give such tiny details if they're at such risk of appearing irrelevant? To keep people oriented in the world, but not only that - it's to give the impression that we as writers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, reliable and authoritative reporters of the world in which the story takes place. The description of the weapon may seem pointless because it doesn't have sufficient relevance support in story conflict, character, etc. and its only underlying message may be "trust me, the writer, because you see that I know what I'm talking about." To my mind, that message alone is not enough - yet it is a very critical one for an author to deliver, whether in sf/f or mainstream work.
Other information we give needs to keep the reader feeling like they're grounded and on their feet in the story world (whatever world it happens to be) and ready to run in whatever direction the hook pulls them, so they don't feel like they're getting dragged behind a galloping horse. I struggle with this question constantly, given that I'm trying to create the impression of very alien worlds - but at the same time I have to keep readers able to follow the complexity of what I'm doing. Typically a reader won't object to information - and a critiquer might even ask for more information - if they feel that information helps them keep oriented in a fully fleshed world. But it's a tricky borderline to walk, as you don't want people to feel you're treating them like they're stupid. I personally recommend that writers trust the reader as much as possible.
I ran across another way that an author speaks to a reader over this weekend, when I was thinking about Harry Potter (which my husband has been reading with my kids). The way you choose to name your character is very important. In my science fiction, I try to keep my choice of names grounded in a language and world system, but also to give the names a flavor that will suggest their character. Bright and dark vowels are a part of this. If you look at the wizards' names in Harry Potter, you'll realize that often, that's J.K. Rowling intentionally trying to share information with you as a reader. Take Professor Remus Lupin, for example. It would be a staggering coincidence if that were truly his last name, and further, at his birth, his parents decided to give him such a lovely wolfly name. Far more likely is that Ms. Rowling is giving him the name for flavor, and to say to her readers something like, "Nudge nudge, here's a hint and if you can figure it out I'll be proud of you."
At this point it seems logical to ask, "What if you're using strictly internal point of view?" Doesn't that make it virtually impossible to communicate directly with readers?
Well, of course not. I've discussed unreliable narrators before, and how a writer can go about separating the sensory impressions and judgments of an unreliable narrator from the total impression a reader gets. Writers can not only use tricks like inclusion of details from the setting that a character doesn't judge. We can also include details that the character does notice, but which offer something else to the reader that the character doesn't pick up on. Every time you repeat a word, or a phrase, or an association of one object with a particular type of emotion, you begin to create a pattern (often an unconscious pattern) in a reader's mind. Literary writers do this all the time, but so do writers of other genres, even without realizing it.
The other thing you can do as a writer using internal point of view is choose when to switch from one point of view to another. This will allow you to control not only what information the reader gets from which character at which time, but also to create a sense of confidentiality with the reader. The spot where a point of view switch occurs doesn't need to be at a moment of low intensity - a safe switch point. It can be at a moment of critical high intensity, a charged switch point, where it will serve the writer's intention. I love to start a situation, such as a scene when one character puts another under pressure, build up a strong sense of character 1's motives and hopefully a sense in the reader of how they want the scene to come out - and then switch points of view to the other character in the same interaction. It not only surprises the reader, it also makes them question the set of expectations they've built up for character 1 by comparing them with those for character 2. And it gives them the sense that they know more than either character does alone, creating a sense of confidentiality with the author.
Before I go, a few thoughts on pov switches. It's important when dealing with point of view switches of this type to keep your descriptions of the cross-pov phenomenon, or object, totally different. If you describe the same thing the same way from two points of view, the whole significance of the switch will be lost. This is why it's often best for a story to stick with one point of view. The difference between the two descriptions is part of the author's message for the reader. In "At Cross Purposes" (the otter story), for example, I have a facial feature for my aliens that gets described from the human point of view and from the alien point of view. My human describes the aliens like this:
"...they have no eyebrows; above each of their wide-set eyes a strip of pebbly black skin extends up to the ear."
My alien describes this same facial feature on another pair of her kind as follows:
"Both have prominent, masculine brow-character – attractive – but Kir bears a pattern like thorns, while Haa has deep folds like cooled lava."
The descriptions are different, but for me, the important part is that each description shows that the feature means something different to the individuals observing it. Because one of my favorite issues to tackle is the different ways that people understand the things that they experience, I'm excited when I get an opportunity to describe the same thing twice. Readers will notice the repetition, and that repetition will in turn bring attention to the difference between the two descriptions. And then my reader and I will be sharing something that none of my characters are experiencing at all.
It's something to think about.
In academia, people tend to be very careful about making statements about authorial intent, especially when an author has been dead for over a hundred years. So they'll talk about the narrator and what the narrator says, or they'll talk about patterns in the text that might suggest different kinds of meanings.
For current writers, the question of a relationship to the reader is a complex one as well. It's better in some ways to figure that once a book or story is published, people will get what they want out of it, on the basis of their own experiences as readers, and this may not have much to do with what you intended - especially as it comes to reading your own reviews.
But whether or not we as writers have a particular message we want to get across (as discussed here in a related post), we DO want to have control over our stories - in particular, how the information in the story gets distributed so that the story is focused and its effect is maximized in the way we intend.
There are easy and hard ways to communicate with a reader. The easiest one is to appoint yourself the narrator and say things straight to the reader. That way, if you're Beatrix Potter, you can say:
"So that is the story of the two Bad Mice, but they were not so very naughty after all, because Tom Thumb paid for everything he broke."
or
"And besides - I have seen that door into the back of the hill called Cat Bells - and besides I am very well acquainted with dear Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle!"
You might say that this isn't the writer speaking to us. Sure, it's not - just as I said above, it's the narrator. But the narrator appears to be using a voice like that of the author, and we might hazard a guess that the author used these devices to back us off the story, while also reassuring the reader about certain things. One thing seems clear to me in the second passage - that Beatrix Potter doesn't want entirely to leave children with the idea that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle was only a hedgehog, but to leave them with a certain sense of wonder.
Direct narrator speaking to the reader isn't just about suddenly breaking into your narrative with discussion of "the story" and what "I" know about it. It occurs all the time in third person omniscient point of view, whenever the narrator describes something that isn't directly observable, or judgeable, by the point of view character.
And in fact, I think you could argue that there's another tool available to the writer using an omniscient narrator - since omniscient viewpoints zoom in and out, drawing closer or farther away from a particular character's judgment, the writer can choose to make these zooms, or not to, in order to control the amount and kind of information given to the reader.
Controlling the amount and kind of information given to the reader is how we keep the story under control, focused and moving forward. Keeping momentum and giving information about the progress of the main story conflict is critical. But so is providing world information so a reader doesn't get lost. That's where the problem of infodumping comes up. What is it but the problem of the writer "getting information across" to the reader? To make the story work, we have to decide what information is really critical for the reader to know.
As J. Kathleen Cheney noted in her post on description, sometimes stains on priest's hems or field-stripping of weapons appears to come into it. But why would we as authors want to give such tiny details if they're at such risk of appearing irrelevant? To keep people oriented in the world, but not only that - it's to give the impression that we as writers are knowledgeable, and more importantly, reliable and authoritative reporters of the world in which the story takes place. The description of the weapon may seem pointless because it doesn't have sufficient relevance support in story conflict, character, etc. and its only underlying message may be "trust me, the writer, because you see that I know what I'm talking about." To my mind, that message alone is not enough - yet it is a very critical one for an author to deliver, whether in sf/f or mainstream work.
Other information we give needs to keep the reader feeling like they're grounded and on their feet in the story world (whatever world it happens to be) and ready to run in whatever direction the hook pulls them, so they don't feel like they're getting dragged behind a galloping horse. I struggle with this question constantly, given that I'm trying to create the impression of very alien worlds - but at the same time I have to keep readers able to follow the complexity of what I'm doing. Typically a reader won't object to information - and a critiquer might even ask for more information - if they feel that information helps them keep oriented in a fully fleshed world. But it's a tricky borderline to walk, as you don't want people to feel you're treating them like they're stupid. I personally recommend that writers trust the reader as much as possible.
I ran across another way that an author speaks to a reader over this weekend, when I was thinking about Harry Potter (which my husband has been reading with my kids). The way you choose to name your character is very important. In my science fiction, I try to keep my choice of names grounded in a language and world system, but also to give the names a flavor that will suggest their character. Bright and dark vowels are a part of this. If you look at the wizards' names in Harry Potter, you'll realize that often, that's J.K. Rowling intentionally trying to share information with you as a reader. Take Professor Remus Lupin, for example. It would be a staggering coincidence if that were truly his last name, and further, at his birth, his parents decided to give him such a lovely wolfly name. Far more likely is that Ms. Rowling is giving him the name for flavor, and to say to her readers something like, "Nudge nudge, here's a hint and if you can figure it out I'll be proud of you."
At this point it seems logical to ask, "What if you're using strictly internal point of view?" Doesn't that make it virtually impossible to communicate directly with readers?
Well, of course not. I've discussed unreliable narrators before, and how a writer can go about separating the sensory impressions and judgments of an unreliable narrator from the total impression a reader gets. Writers can not only use tricks like inclusion of details from the setting that a character doesn't judge. We can also include details that the character does notice, but which offer something else to the reader that the character doesn't pick up on. Every time you repeat a word, or a phrase, or an association of one object with a particular type of emotion, you begin to create a pattern (often an unconscious pattern) in a reader's mind. Literary writers do this all the time, but so do writers of other genres, even without realizing it.
The other thing you can do as a writer using internal point of view is choose when to switch from one point of view to another. This will allow you to control not only what information the reader gets from which character at which time, but also to create a sense of confidentiality with the reader. The spot where a point of view switch occurs doesn't need to be at a moment of low intensity - a safe switch point. It can be at a moment of critical high intensity, a charged switch point, where it will serve the writer's intention. I love to start a situation, such as a scene when one character puts another under pressure, build up a strong sense of character 1's motives and hopefully a sense in the reader of how they want the scene to come out - and then switch points of view to the other character in the same interaction. It not only surprises the reader, it also makes them question the set of expectations they've built up for character 1 by comparing them with those for character 2. And it gives them the sense that they know more than either character does alone, creating a sense of confidentiality with the author.
Before I go, a few thoughts on pov switches. It's important when dealing with point of view switches of this type to keep your descriptions of the cross-pov phenomenon, or object, totally different. If you describe the same thing the same way from two points of view, the whole significance of the switch will be lost. This is why it's often best for a story to stick with one point of view. The difference between the two descriptions is part of the author's message for the reader. In "At Cross Purposes" (the otter story), for example, I have a facial feature for my aliens that gets described from the human point of view and from the alien point of view. My human describes the aliens like this:
"...they have no eyebrows; above each of their wide-set eyes a strip of pebbly black skin extends up to the ear."
My alien describes this same facial feature on another pair of her kind as follows:
"Both have prominent, masculine brow-character – attractive – but Kir bears a pattern like thorns, while Haa has deep folds like cooled lava."
The descriptions are different, but for me, the important part is that each description shows that the feature means something different to the individuals observing it. Because one of my favorite issues to tackle is the different ways that people understand the things that they experience, I'm excited when I get an opportunity to describe the same thing twice. Readers will notice the repetition, and that repetition will in turn bring attention to the difference between the two descriptions. And then my reader and I will be sharing something that none of my characters are experiencing at all.
It's something to think about.
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