A Simple One, But ...(R)

[Peg Herring]

I used to teach high school, and that's a job where you see a range of writing skills, from pretty darned good to downright awful. One mistake often made but easily corrected is starting sentences with the same word over and over. Particularly in passages where things are happening to a protag, it's difficult to avoid repeating "He" or "She" or in the case of first-person narrative, "I" as the first word of a sentence. This isn't limited to student writing. I've seen some big-name authors, probably writing to a deadline, who didn't go back and reread often enough to catch this natural (but annoying to the reader) tendency. To check for repetitive beginnings, simply choose a page at random and list or underline the first word of each sentence. You'll easily see if you've overdone a word, and you can rearrange sentence structures to correct the problem. It's not so much that you don't know, it's that you don't notice!

[Peg Herring]

And lack of editing. Once they get a big name, there's less editing, I think both because editors feel shy about criticizing someone who's considered a good writer by the world and also (maybe) because the book will sell anyway so they just hurry it along. Most people these days buy the author they liked last time.
I had a similar problem in my little town. I'd been the English teacher forever, so when I asked for editing help on my books, most people thought my work would automatically be "right" or that they couldn't criticize their former teacher.

[Clair Dickson]

I agree with you on this! It's easy to fall into (though I usually can't write more than two sentences that start the same way without having to fix it) and it's easy to fix IF a writer just goes back to carefully read what they have written. I think the latter is where several big name authors get a bit lax (whether from pressure or complacency, I can't say.)