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

Amy:  1 

ABRAHAM: Do you bite your thumb at us, sir?
SAMPSON: I do bite my thumb, sir.