The Importance of Variety

An old joke in the entertainment industry goes like this: “Variety is the spice of life –  and the bible of show business.” (I used to subscribe to Variety back when I was fascinated by Broadway shows.)

OK, it’s not hilarious…but it’s a good lead-in to what I want to talk about today: the need for variety in your writing.

I had my first encounter with this principle when I was still in elementary school. I loved to read (still do!), and I was happy to read just about anything. The Bobbsey Twins books were a great favorite.  I loved The Five Little Peppers and How They Grew. There was a wonderful series of biographies for children that was fun to read. I devoured the books about the Happy Hollisters and Honey Bunch. If it was a book, I loved it. (One of the few books I couldn’t get through was – oddly – Winnie the Pooh. I still have never read it.)

My favorite of all was the classic Heidi by Johanna Spyri. And so I was delighted one afternoon when I came across another book by Spyri: Cornelli. (It’s still in print, and you can also read it online free.) Of course I read Cornelli straight through with the speed of a lightning bolt.

Here’s a summary: A motherless little girl is living a very happy life under the care of a loving man. (In Cornelli’s case, it’s her widowed father.) But then everything changes, and she’s very unhappy.

If you read and loved Heidi as a child, you already know what I’m going to say: Cornelli is Heidi all over again. Spyri wrote the same book twice.

It was the first time I’d read a book with a critical eye. Maybe you could say that the door of childhood was beginning to close for me. I remember wondering if Spyri had experienced such a terrible loss in her childhood that she couldn’t think about anything else, ever.

Johanna Spyri was kind of a one-hit-wonder in children’s literature. Although she continued to write books for kids, none of them ever caught fire the way Heidi did. Perhaps the reason was that she got herself stuck on that one theme – a kind of Garden-of-Eden loss of wonder and beauty. (Of course I’ve never read any of her other books, so I don’t know if that’s true.)

It’s easy to slide into the habit of writing the same thing again and again in different ways. You don’t notice that you’re stuck in one idea, so you think every story (or blog post or article or whatever) is different. But it’s not.

Case in point: John Rosemond’s “Parenting with Love and Leadership” columns. Rosemond is a family psychologist who advocates a common-sense approach to parenting. He believes that parents today are too involved with their children’s lives. They need to back off and let kids grapple on their own with the everyday challenges of school, play, and family life.

That’s sound advice. (I know several wonderful parents who swear by Rosemond – they say he gives them courage.) But – damn it! – he writes the same column every blessed week.

Our local newspaper dropped Rosemond’s column several years ago (perhaps because he keeps saying the same thing over and over and over and over?). Last week I went online to see if I’d missed anything since his column disappeared from our paper. Nope. It’s like he didn’t even stop to take a breath.

Rosemond seems to be a smart and likable guy. I’m sure he’s wonderful with the families that he counsels, and he has a vast storehouse of experience and knowledge that he could bring to his column. I’m just as sure that Johanna Spyri had a treasury of wonderful childhood memories. The problem is with their writing: they both found one thing that worked – and worked well! – and they stayed there.

Don’t let that happen to your writing! Remember, variety is the spice of life and….

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