I recently read “The Bestseller Code” by Jodie Archer and Matthew Jockers. Of course, their title captured me instantly. Is there a formula for a bestseller? If so, how close is my novel, ‘Death by Roses’? Can such a code help with my future writing? What about yours? Call me fascinated.
What astounded me most was their particular fact about ONE word. Did you know that using the word ‘the’ too often in novels actually rips energy out of a story and bores your readers? Really? Apparently so. ‘The’ nails a story’s coffin shut?
Now I’m a linguist, fascinated with English and I have long studied ‘T-H-E’ because I’ve believed what Archer and Jockers say about ‘the’ for a long time. Their revelation supports my word study. One of my favorite things to do as I read books is to remove ‘the’ and rearrange words of a sentence to bring it to life. Call me weird. It’s even weirder that a sophisticated study supports what I’ve considered intuitively for so long.
Can one word really make that much difference? Apparently so! In his book, Mr. Mercedes, Stephen King kept T-H-E to 4.8%. (By the way if you didn’t know that such word counts can be tracked, there are lots of other exciting statistics in “The Bestseller Code” for you to enjoy.)
What I’ve found is that I write more actively if I challenge myself to work without ‘the’. Try it here: “And nowhere is the importance of style seen more vividly than in the work of those authors who are hitting the NYT list for the first time.” 27 words; 4 THE = 4/27 = 15%. Apparently, King would have only one THE for that sentence.
Here’s my change: ‘Style’s importance is most vividly seen in works by authors making their debut on the NYT list.’ You might be able to do better. See if YOU can make our highlighted sentence more interesting without ‘the’. E-mail your ideas to [email protected].
‘THE’ is our most common word in English. That probably doesn’t surprise you but it begs a question…what if we remove ‘the’ from what we write? If reducing its appearance in our novels make them more compelling to read, what might it do for everything we write?
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Vivian!