Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Do You Bite Your Lip at Us, Sir?

A writer of my acquaintance has a particular pet peeve about authors who have a character bite his or her lip when that character is nervous, angry, or deep in thought. She says—and I agree whole-heartedly—that it almost always seems contrived.                                                  

I provide the following analysis for her benefit.

The book Cyteen contains, by my count, twenty-two instances where someone's lip is bitten, gnawed, chewed, or caught between their teeth. Sometimes the lip is just bitten; sometimes it is bitten until it hurts; other times it is bitten until it bleeds.
                                      
With 680 pages in the book, this is an average of one lip-biting every 31 pages. Usually lip-biting is an isolated occurrence, but there is at least one time that two lip-biting incidents appear on the same page, and one time where lip-biting occurs on three consecutive pages.
  
Lip-biting incidents in Cyteen break down across characters as follows:

Ariane:  12
Justin:  5
Mikhail:  3
Yanni:  1

1 comment:

  1. Helen,

    Very amusing! It won't be long until they move on to some other body-part maceration in response... So pleased you listen to the wee bits of wisdom from the non-lip-biting writers of your acquaintance! XD

    Cheers,
    Marly

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