There is something I often do when I write (and I rarely ever write), and that is repeat a word. Truthfully, this is because of my poor vocabulary. My lack of knowledge in higher quality words, as well as my extremely small closet of words (more accurately, my vision in finding words is just extremely far-sighted), causes me to latch onto one for longer than I should.
I start off a paragraph with this sentence:
I gaze at myself often now as I have never seen a more unfamiliar figure. I am trying to figure it out.
I repeat 'figure' which adds a particular rhythm to the text, and I do enjoy the rhythm of texts (I have learned that I mainly focus on movement or rhythm in things, such as music, visual art, etc.) so this isn't entirely accidental. What really happens as I wrote this is that my mental picture was of me looking in the mirror at myself, but specifically viewing myself as some form of a human: a form of a human is a figure. I write the word figure because it matches the concept I was aiming for and affirms a sense or tone I was meaning to construe. Then I must describe why I will look in the mirror at myself, which is to understand what I'm looking at. My poor vocabulary and tendency towards casual language closes down all walls, leaving only the phrase 'figure it out' left to choose. I cannot see past any of these walls because I had just chosen the word 'figure' for the previous sentence and it is now stuck in my head.
I allow this repetition to occur because there is a sharp difference between the two sentences. 'Figure' was chosen in the 1st due to its representative connection for the object of 'myself as a human thing', so it is already slightly abstracted, slightly metaphorical, and in a way formal: the word 'figure' elicits thoughts of figure painting, the "nice" formal word for body.
I have always felt an unreasonable disgust at the word body, similar to looking at raw meat in a deli. This disgust was at such a level to where my mother would allow me to run off to a different section of the grocery store. I now have fond memories of this moment for it was the rare chance for me to be alone in a public setting, without any responsibility for watching the shopping cart or hunting down an item. And so body becomes the deli meat which stands in the way from my peaceful solitude.
The 1st sentence is also lengthy in its route of description. I often write sentences like these, especially when I'm desperately trying to describe something, both ignoring any enjoyable rhythm of text, while also keeping my attention on not using too many words: the result is a choppy, weirdly accurate, 'I can't cut this down or rearrange this anymore' type of sentence.
I gaze at myself often: a striking-down motion, grounding with the descriptor of 'often'... as I have never seen a more unfamiliar figure: a rocky upwards motion, the steps of 'as I', 'have', 'never' acting as mini strike-downs (thus they became the flat steps of a stairway)...
A choppier sentence usually will have a lot of "that" words in it, as if the sentence throws a handful of words at you and points at each one, like a child reciting reading a book, not yet away of how a sentence should flow. This is a mixture of the two, a stairway.
The 2nd sentence is informal, short, and straightforward not by way of a striking-down motion, but a toss. It tosses itself at you, and says 'there.' That's all there is to it. It uses the phrase 'figure it out' and elicits a casual tone, and so the toss motion is more so represented by a shrug. A friendly toss from a stranger, but he wears no expression on his face.
By opposing the two in succession, especially when the 1st sentence starts the paragraph, makes the reader (and me as the writer) jump from one world to the next: dualisms of formal/casual, choppy/smooth, descriptive/expressionless. And so the repetition of one word, especially when it occurs at the end of the first sentence, makes an ostensive connection between the two worlds. It doesn't connect them actively, it actually separates them further. The word 'figure' makes an appearance in a formal and luxurious manner, it bows and leaves, but then we see 'figure' again, this time as a stranger. 'Well I'm not the first figure because just look at me...' it shrugs. But as a reader of words, the repetition of a word is so loud and obnoxious that it seems wild two figures managed to appear before us as two different identities: a revolving door of words and their refusal of identity theft.
There are more examples of this, but I am not going to go search for them. From my memory, I am thinking of times the repetition of a word occurs starting at the last sentence of a paragraph, and then again at the first sentence of the next paragraph. This should take on a different motion from a revolving door, something like jumping out of a window and landing on the grass, where we as the reader become confused about if we were watching someone through a window from our 2nd floor apartment and suddenly ended up on the grass with them, or if we never left our location at all.
Note: I have always hated the first sentence in my example! Even in my analysis I became under the influence of my writer-self and did not look closely enough at the words. I often read it as if it is 'I gaze at myself as never seeing a more unfamiliar figure', a usage of as to mean doing something simultaneously. Then I correct myself and reread it as "I gaze at myself often as I have never seen a more unfamiliar figure", and picture myself in awe of my own image, as this sentence is similar in wording to the phrase 'I have never seen a more beautiful...' But both are wrong! The 'now' always escapes! I must read it slowly, climb the stairs much slower: I have been looking at myself a lot, recently, because I look unfamiliar, so much so to where I haven't seen a more unfamiliar figure than myself. This is what I am trying to say. But I refuse to say it in such a manner, it's too casual. I must act proper and run away from the meat deli, only to chop my fleeing in half with the butcher's knife out of nowhere.
I also enjoy creating a metaphor, and then turning that metaphor into a world to continuously revisit.
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