The worst thing about writing is trying to remember what I've already written. Did I already make x comparison? Did I use y joke in z post last year? Have I already used these letters for variables I may need to bring up later?
It's an excercise in futility in the end. You'll probably recycle a thought or borrow a simile from your previous work and not even know you did it. A lot of times I throw in a key word that I already used in the previous sentence without noticing and it totally kills any rhythm. If I can't remember what I wrote literally 21 words ago, the odds that I'll be able to write a full paragraph without plagiarizing myself at least three or four times can't be good.
I read a few posts recently on a big sports blog ripping apart a national columnist for whipping out a favorite phrase over and over again like a dirty, smelly security blanket and I thought, "Thank God no one reads anything I write."
There are certain trends and flourishes I use that I already know about and that will probably accompany my writing forever. Flourishes like periods. I really like using periods. I know. It's cliche.
It's great to have a style until someone cracks your formula and every subsequent bit of writing borders on self parody. I call this the Christopher Walken Effect. At one point Christopher Walken starred in movies like The Deer Hunter. Then every comedian on the planet developed a spot-on Walken impression and suddenly nothing Walken said could be taken seriously anymore. Thus Walken found himself relegated to making movies like The Country Bears and taking on parts where he was married to John Travolta. Now Walken wanders the Earth from talk show to talk show, lending his unusual cadence to poems and song lyrics not written with him in mind while the audience laughs. With each self-deprecating performance, he reinforced his vocal notoriety until he was stuck in an infinite loop the likes of which only William Shatner and Deep Movie Trailer Voice Guy can truly understand.
Sometimes it's easy to identify the things you overdo. For instance, I used get violently nauseous when I tried to write an entire piece without at least one reference to an early 90s cartoon show. Luckily, when I reached my teenage years, I ninja kicked this bizarre mutation to the curb. Turtles.
But I think it's inevitable that eventually everyone becomes stale. It happens with TV shows all the time. The formula gets old, but the show has formed its boundaries and it's impossible to break out of them by the third or fourth season. It's tough for writers to decide that, hey, maybe Jack Bauer had a really lighthearted day and spent it goofing off with his friends eating ice cream and getting into non-explosion related trouble. Like maybe in one episode his hands get sticky from all the ice cream and his gun gets stuck to his hand while they're at the baseball game.
Sometimes people just go with what sells. Fans get used to one thing and encourage the writer to keep pumping out the same dreck. Reading the Redwall books was great when I was little until I realized I could rip out a couple pages from one book in the series and glue them in another and the result would be only mild confusion on the part of the reader that all the characters had suddenly assigned each other new nicknames. The way I remember it, one third of a Redwall novel was descriptions of food. The rest was rodent combat culminating in a showdown between a young hero mouse and a pirate.
I think getting stale is usually an accident... mostly a byproduct of getting lazy and not spending enough time broadening your repertoire, but sometimes also just a result of our frustratingly limited brains.
Anyway, I think there's some kind of pride to be had in going stale. You probably didn't mold for one. And for two, enough people paid attention to what you were doing that they got tired of you.
I hope they write, "We read everything he had to say and then some" on my grave.
