#49: Creating Meaningful Repetition with Noun Phrases

Rita Bullwinkel, Robert Lopez, Virginia Tufte, Nathan Ballingrud, Charlotte McConaghy, Jules Verne.

Hello friends! Before I dive into this month’s craft essays, two quick bits of news:

First, my review of Charlotte McConaughy’s new novel Wild Dark Shore was in The New York Times Book Review recently! I really dug the book, and I hope you’ll check out the review and (more importantly) the novel. It’s one of my favorite reads of 2025 so far, and I liked it so much I went on to read McConaughy’s Migrations, which was also excellent. Both are what I might call “climate grief thrillers,” and there’s some fantastic nature writing throughout. Don’t miss them.

Second, a reminder that my Worldbuilding Initiative at Arizona State University has several events left this month and next, all of which are free and open to the public, either in-person on our Tempe Campus or online via Zoom. The remaining lineup is as follows:

March 25: “Into the Animal Body: Wild Narratives for a World on Fire” with Distinguished Lecturer Talia Lakshmi Kolluri

April 9: Speculative Histories: Lost Archives and Alternative Realities

April 23: ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Student Showcase

I hope you’ll join me for any of these events that might interest you!

For as long as I can remember, people have mostly referred to me by my full name. Even to close friends, I am often “Matt Bell” instead of “Matt,” so much so that I can almost guarantee that on any given day most acquaintances will use the former rather than the latter, even when speaking to me in person. (“Matt Bell!” they say. “It’s so good to see you!”) Same with my students, who address me or refer to me as “Matt Bell” rather than “Professor Bell” or even “Matt,” which is what I ask them to call me.

This has never bothered me—it usually feels affectionate, although there’s certainly a way to make it mocking, if I remember right from middle school—but certainly it’s a little atypical. But maybe it’s also why I’ve always been attracted to the use of repeated noun phrases in fiction, especially when they’re used effectively as building blocks for meaningful pattern making and other sorts of literary effects.

Before we dive into some examples, let me pause quickly for some brief definitions from Virginia Tufte’s essential reference text, Artful Sentences: Syntax as Style. (Seriously. If you don’t own a copy of this one, track it down.) About noun phrases, Tufte writes:

In basic sentences, the components of noun phrases most frequently seen are noun alone, or with determiner (often a, am, or the), or with additional modifiers; pronoun alone or with modifiers; verbals, especially infinitives and gerunds; clauses; nominalized adjectives or other parts of speech.

So noun phrases can be a single word or something much more complex: there’s really no upper limit on how long a noun phrase can be, and it can slot into any part of a sentence where a simple noun can also function, starting with the most basic sentences—“Spot ran” is a one-word noun phrase (“Spot”) plus a one-word verb phrase (“ran”)—and increasing in complexity from there. According to Tufte, these acceptable slots include:

Slots for noun phrases in the basic sentences include subject, predicate nominative, direct object, indirect object, object of preposition, and objective complement. In expanded sentences, functions include the noun as a modifier of another noun, the adverbial noun, the noun as fragment, the noun as appositive, the noun in the nominative absolute, and the noun series or catalog.

Don’t worry if all of that is a bit much! As with many things, grammar rules generally become more clear with examples, so let’s dive into a few.

I’ll start with a passage from my own work, from my earliest days of playing around repeated noun phrases, well before I knew how to name what I was doing. Written in 2008, the month before I went to grad school, my story “The Collectors” is a fictionalization of the last days of the Collyer Brothers, famous hoarders who died days apart in their Harlem brownstone in 1947. It unfolds in short, flash-like sections, and at some point I hit upon the idea of writing the bits depicting the separate discoveries of the brothers’ bodies by repeating the names of the two men who found them, a choice I hoped gave an insistent solidity to these historical men for whom I’d otherwise found few details to draw upon. Here’s one of those sections, with bolding added for emphasis:

William Baker breaks a second-story window from atop a shaking ladder. William Baker peers into the darkness and then signals to the other officers that he’s going in. William Baker uses his nightstick to clear all the glass out of his way. William Baker climbs through the window into the room beyond. William Baker gags but does not vomit. William Baker turns his flashlight from left to right, then back again, like a lighthouse in a sea of trash. William Baker thinks, Not a sea but a mountain rising from a sea, a new, unintended landscape. William Baker begins to take inventory in his mind, counting piles of broken furnishings, books molded to floorboards. William Baker puts his hands to a wall of old newspapers and pushes until he sinks in to his wrists. William Baker finds the entrance to the tunnel that leads out of the room, then gets down on his hands and knees and crawls through. William Baker passes folding chairs and sewing machines and a winepress. William Baker passes the skeleton of a cat or else a rat as big as a cat. William Baker turns left at a baby carriage, crawls over a bundle of old umbrellas. William Baker crawls until he can’t hear the other officers yelling to him from the window. William Baker is inside the house, inside its musty, rotted breath, inside its tissues of decaying paper and wood.

William Baker disappears from the living world and doesn’t come back for two hours, when he appears at the window with his face blanched so white it shines in the midnight gloom. William Baker knows where Homer Collyer’s body is. William Baker has held the dead man, has lifted him from his death chair as if the skin and bones and tattered blue-and-white bathrobe constitute a human person, someone worth saving. William Baker thinks it took a long time for the man to die. William Baker counts the seconds that pass, the minutes, the days and the years. William Baker has no idea.

This a brute-force approach to repetition, using the anaphora of the noun phrase “William Baker” to generate a kind of a propulsive force. But if much of the power of repetition comes from where and when you break the pattern you’ve established, then perhaps my example fails to take full advantage of the technique: the pattern never breaks! So let’s move on a more complicated (and accomplished) example.

In one of my favorite very short Robert Lopez stories, “One of My Daughters is Called Resnick,” (from his book Asunder) the author uses a variety of repeated noun phrases to stitch his short tale together, propelling the story by tone more than by plot, building his narrator’s interior life through obsessive, iterative repetitions. Here’s the story in its entirety, again with at least some of the repeated noun phrases highlighted in bold:

The bruised parts of a banana are poison. I’ve gone up to people on street corners—I’ve said, the bruised parts of a banana are poison. I’ve said you mustn’t eat them. I never use the word mustn’t unless I’m talking about the bruised parts of bananas. Only young actresses say the word mustn’t out loud. They are allowed to because they have long curly hair and pretty polished toes. They say I mustn’t eat this whole box of cookies right now. Or they say I mustn’t allow complacency and ennui within a city block of my long curly hair and pretty polished toes. I’ve seen them on street corners and I’ve said to them the bruised parts of a banana are poison. I’ve said you mustn’t eat them. Some of the young actresses thank me for saving their lives and others don’t thank me at all. These thankless ones walk away quickly in some other direction. I like the way the thankless ones walk so it’s always fine with me when this happens. The ones who do thank me are my favorites, though. They have the longest curliest hair and the prettiest polished toes. I tell them all about what is poisonous in the world. Envelopes you have to lick with your tongue, green bell peppers, vitamin C with rose hips, and so on. To make myself clear I ask them what the hell is a rose hip. Not one of them ever knows the answer. What they say is I mustn’t allow Mr. Resnick to push me around anymore. I tell them they are absolutely right about this. Then I ask them who is Mr. Resnick and they answer he is the director, silly. This is another word young actresses say out loud and there’s nothing wrong with it. I like it when the young girls call me silly. I always ask them how they know my name is silly and they giggle. Eventually I tell them I understand what they are saying and then I say one of my daughters is called Resnick as a way of relating to them. This is when that gut love connection explodes all over everyone. It fills the universe. At this moment they know they have to trust that gut love connection because this is what it means to be alive and on the planet. This is what they have waited their entire lives for. Now I invite them home so we can eat unbruised bananas and make long polished gut love all night. On the way I tell them the world is full of all kinds of poison and we have to be careful. I tell them we have to live inside our gut love and not let anyone else in. I tell them I will save their lives every day forever if only they let me.

Compared to my example from “The Collectors,” Lopez employs a bigger set of repeated elements, some of which are slightly varied: it’s more of a slant rhyme approach than my exact repetitions. As you can see, individual units also don’t persist through the entire piece: the oft-repeated “bruised parts of a banana,” for instance, is confined to the first half of the story; in the second half, its only “unbruised bananas” that appear, and then just once. In fact, most of the first-half’s repeated noun phrases—”young actresses,” “long curly hair,” “pretty polished toes”—fall off after the turn in the middle of the story, which I track as beginning with “I tell them all about what is poisonous in the world.” (You might argue that “poison”—a one-word noun phrase—and “all that is poisonous in the world”—a seven-word noun phrase—make another slant repetition.) The second half of this one-paragraph story works with its own newly introduced repetitions, especially the various versions of “that gut love connection” that dominate. For me, this shift creates a sense of progression at the level of language—a poetic progression, perhaps, as opposed to plot progression—and therefore satisfies the basic need of a story to include (and be completed by) change.

I’ve been thinking about these effects lately in large part because of reading and enjoying Rita Bullwinkel’s novel Headshot, which follows eight young women boxers through the final rounds of a Las Vegas tournament. Most of the novel’s chapters are titled after the boxers whose bout they cover—”Andi Taylor vs. Artemis Victor,” for instance—but the contents often range far away from the fights. It’s not a scene heavy novel, and in fact there’s little to no in-scene dialogue at all: who talks during a boxing match? Instead, most of what we’re given are fragments of interiority and flashbacks and even flash-forwards, plus bits of description and commentary on the nature of boxing and womanhood that may or may not be attached to any particular character. (In an interview with Lincoln Michel, Bullwinkel said she thinks of “the third person narrator of the finished book as a Greek chorus of all the girl fighters that have come before, and the girl fighters that will come after the moment of the book and these eight young women boxers… a collective of voices and experiences.”)

There is a plot question holding Headshot together—which of the eight women will win the boxing tournament?—but in many ways that question is more scaffold than story, providing a structure through which Bullwinkel can explore the interior lives of her boxers, as well as their pasts and futures. What propelled me as I read was less who wins the tournament—a couple of weeks out from finishing my read, I honestly don’t remember who won the final bout—and more the many, many fine observations Bullwinkel makes, as well as the way in which she uses repetition and tone to keep the reader interested and to iterate her characters’ ideas, obsessions, experiences, traumas, and so on.

As in my example from “The Collectors,” Bullwinkel frequently repeats the full names of her characters, as in her novel’s opening paragraph, but with more pronouns swapped in to create more variety and difference:

Andi Taylor is pumping her hands together, hitting her own flat stomach, thinking not of her mother sitting at home with her little brother, not of her car, which barely got her here, not of her summer job, her lifeguarding at the overcrowded community pool, not of the four-year-old she watched die, the four-year-old she practically killed, and his blue cheeks. They shouldn’t give teenagers the job of saving children. It doesn’t matter how many CPR classes you’ve taken. She killed the boy with her wandering eyes. His swimsuit had small red trucks on it. He looked like he was made out of plastic. The feel of his thigh when she pulled him from the bottom of the pool, already dead, and the way it was so easy to grip, because it was so small, she’s not thinking about it. She’s looking at the skylight and the light it’s letting in on this shithole gym and she’s thinking about the things she always does wrong when she fights, her lazy left guard, the way her left hand slips away and doesn’t protect her face if she’s not thinking about it. She is also thinking about the way Artemis Victor will get her. If Andi Taylor doesn’t think about this, this fight will be over in a matter of seconds. Andi Taylor needs to think about her spacing and her stomach. Andi Taylor needs to think about her stance.

You can see here how Bullwinkel also uses the repetition of the noun phrase “Andi Taylor” to set up other repetitions, like in the last three sentences of the paragraph, where the name is followed by slight variations on the same verb/verb phrase: “doesn’t think about,” “needs to think about,” “needs to think about” again—all of which follow on the earlier “thinking not of” and “thinking about” verb phrases. (Italics above are mine, to make this easier to see. Also, note how each of the final verb phrases has its own unique noun phrase as its object.) In this way, her noun phrase and verb phrase repetitions come together in the last sentences of the paragraph, providing a kind of poetic closure to the novel’s opening fragment.

Here’s another example from Headshot, this time with more non-name repeated noun phrases, most of which are of the “slant” variety seen in the Lopez example:

In Douglas, Michigan, there is a town square with a statue of a dog that saved someone during a war. Iggy Lang wants to be a war hero. She would do anything to be a war hero, and to have a statue made for her in a park, too. Iggy would kill people, be killed by people, or turn her body into a dog’s body just to have a statue of her in a town square that people passed and touched and looked at, and stopped and talked about, with affection and joy. Maybe I just want to be a dog, thinks Iggy. Iggy has, has always had, a purple stain on and above her lip, which already makes her look like a marked animal. Iggy thinks the spot is what saved her from liking people. Everyone else she knows is flat-minded and full of admiration for the television. Iggy just wants to be the best in the world at something, and Iggy is the best in the world at something. She is one of the best fifteen-year-olds in the world at boxing. She’s got three more years before she ages up and out of this tournament, which means that by the time she is eighteen she’ll be a reigning champion, because Iggy is going to win this fight, and the one after, and then she’ll shape-shift into a 1940s spotted Labrador so that someone can make a statue of her and put it on a green.

I love how Iggy Lang’s first thought about “a town square with a statue of a dog” becomes “a statue in a park” becomes “a statue of her in a town square” becomes “a statue of her… on a green,” so that what’s happening on the page mirrors the progress of Iggy’s own fantasy, replacing the real dog statue with an imagined future statue of a triumphant Iggy, who by then will then also somehow have become a dog. Headshot is told in an omniscient, roving third-person POV, but in moments like this, the language brings invites us into a particular character’s specific way of thinking. The novel’s voice may be that of a “Greek chorus of all the girl fighters” past and present, but Bullwinkel’s repetition of noun phrases is one of the tools she uses to bring us very close to individual consciousnesses, when she so chooses.

Obviously, these kinds of repetition can be quite noticeable, especially when experienced aloud, as I did while listening to the audiobook of Headshot. There’s more artifice here than a lot of writers are aiming for, with their “invisible” prose that seeks not to call attention to itself. But of course all fiction is artifice, and the greater attention that Lopez and Bullwinkel demand with their repeated noun phrases allows for a different kind of interiority, a different kind of emphasis. Even if you don’t use it throughout an entire novel or story, as these writers have, there may be a place where such repetitions can momentarily create a tonal shift for emphasis, or slow down time, or allow for depicting iterative, obsessive thought in a new way. Give it a try sometime and see what comes of it, either in a standalone short or in a new passage of a larger project you’re always working on. Find a piece of language worth repeating and try to keep juggling it until it shifts or transforms or becomes something new. Look always for the change that breaks the pattern, remembering that it’s in what’s different and where that difference appears that repetition finds much of its power.

Good luck with your writing this month!

What I’m Reading:

The Strange by Nathan Ballingrud. As a fan of Ballingrud’s stories, I bought The Strange as soon as it released in 2023, but for some reason didn’t get around to reading it until now. I’m sorry I waited so long! It ticks a lot of boxes for me: it’s in some ways a retelling of Charles Portis’s True Grit, only set on the kind of Mars that Ray Bradbury wrote about; it’s an alternative history of a space race that proceeds more from Jules Verne than from Sputnik; it’s got a great narrator and a ton of fun mysteries to explore. I’ve only got a few chapters left and I can’t wait to see them through. Highly recommended.

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Matt Bell’s novel Appleseed (a New York Times Notable book) was published by HarperCollins in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, & revision, is out now from Soho Press. He’s also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Esquire, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.

His website can be found at www.mattbell.com.