Young Writers Society

Hey there, hope you don't mind if I pick a couple of brains here.....

I've noticed that lately my writing has been bogged down by an excessive use of 'the,' especially in descriptions. Been trying to cut a lot of it out now that I'm in the editing stage of my novel, but for some reason it's not as easy as I thought it would be.

So my question is this: are there any good practices for breaking the habit of using 'the' too much?

I'm not too sure about this problem myself, but personally, I've had times where I found myself repeating certain phrases or particular words a lot, too, so I guess I can try and help here

You might want to try waiting for a couple of days or so, then going back to your writing to read it through once again, perhaps you'll come up with something smoother on the spot. It works for me most of the time, and if not, the most I can do would be to sit and stare at it until I manage to force something out of my mind which works as a better fix, although if anyone has problems with this 'repeating' thing, I would appreciate a better solution too .

Can we have a sample? Sometimes, the problem isn't necessarily the repetition of a word/phrase, but the repetition of a type of sentence structure.

@Samp: Yeah, sometimes that's the best way to go about it. The polishing process can be pretty lengthy, but it does help. Thank you for your input, and hopefully we can both figure out a good solution, yeah?


@Kyll: Ah, right. Here's an example:

"Everyone was seated around the long wooden table in the middle of the spacious room."

There's a lot of that when it comes to settings.
And you're exactly right, actually. I do have problems with repetition of sentence structure; I seem to have about three distinct types that I generally use, and it makes for some stale reading...

It's really not that bad in that example. "The" is one of those so common, you don't notice them words (kind of like "said"), and I actually didn't notice all the "the"s until I went back and paid attention.

Going back to sentence structure, you could reorganize that example sentence to something like: "The room was spacious, and in the middle was everyone, seated around a long, wooden table." That particular structure gets rid of one of the "the"s while also being a bit more interesting to read.

Oh...well, in that case, maybe I'm just getting paranoid because I've been going through the story with a fine-tooth comb, and my internal-editor is cranked up on 'Extreme'....

Thank you very much for the help.

I agree with Kyllorac, most cases of 'the' just blend into the background. However if you really want to tighten up your writing then I guess there are places you can avoid them. Eliminating them is also a good way of forcing your mind to come up with more interesting ways of phrasing things.

Generalisationing
When you generalise people or objects you can eliminate 'the' and pluralise things to get a more immediate sense of what's going on in the story.

"The people in the city walked down the street like rats on a boat that's sinking beneath the cascading waves of the ocean ."

Sometimes getting rid of 'the' when using generalisations can actually make them stronger. So in the above case you could get rid of 'the' by simply tweaking the sentence to:

"People walked down city streets like rats on a boat that's sinking beneath torrents of cascading waves."

Nounopoly
That's when you have a lot of nouns to smush into one sentence.

"The man walked up to the table, scooped up the coins and dropped them into the pocket of the jacket he was wearing."

I find with this it's best to either cut out the nouns that aren't important, like so:

"The man scooped the coins from the table into his pocket."

Or if they are important, give them more of a spotlight:

"He walked slowly towards an old battered table that he remembered being there since his youth, where lay a pile of dusty gold coins. With a single movement he pocketed them and zipped up his late-fathers jacket around him before leaving."

Not a direct translation, but it was the best I could do :p

Unspecificed Stuff
That's when you use 'the' to name something that doesn't have a name, like in the previous example.

"The woman looked down at the boy. The boy looked back up at the woman. The train driver asked if something was wrong and the boy started to cry."

If there is a specific reason for not giving someone a name then you can just use a capitalised 'He' or 'She,' or you can give a hint of what they are by their actions rather than words. Depending on your genre, you could substitute names all together. Like this:

"She looked down at him and he clutched his suitcase tighter. He looked back up at her and she shifted her feet uncomfortably. He started to cry when Mr Train Driver came with his thick beard and big belly and asked if something was wrong."

That is incredibly helpful...thank you very much!