What are the grammatical and stylistic alternatives to avoid overusing pronouns?

Question

Recently, I've developed a habit of writing he/she/him/her and overusing the character's name at the beginning of sentences. For example:

Pandora ran through the snow, following the coughs to a small building that barely qualified as a house. There were huge holes in the sides, and embers danced on wood left behind. Inside was a man in a business suit with dirty hair setting a girl down. She coughed till she almost turned blue. This must have been the voice I heard.
The man looked around, anxious. "You're going to be fine." He consulted the child. He began to remove his jacket and wrap it around the little girl. A small smile fell on his face. "Now, I'm going to find some help. Just wait here."

She groaned in response as he left her in a small hidden corner. She sat there dazed before she looked to realize that this was real, that this was her life. "What is going on?" She cried, her whisper turning into a sob. Tears fell, tracing the curvature of the girl's face as she pulled herself into a tight ball. "Why did this have to happen to us?" Her hair fell in front like a curtain almost; As if to hide her from the world around her.

What grammatical and stylistic alternatives can writers use to avoid this problem?

Answer 1

Firstly, I think pronouns and character names are some of the things that often stand out less to readers than you might think - they're easy to gloss over, in the same way as the word "said" after dialogue, which usually doesn't need replacing with a different verb.

However, sentence variety is important. It's possible that the problem you're seeing is too many sentences beginning with pronouns, rather than too many pronouns. One way to address this might be to rearrange the order of some of your sentences. For example, you could change the sentence beginning "He began to remove" to something like

Removing his jacket, he wrapped it around the little girl.

Now you don't have "he" at the start - but be careful, because any sentence pattern can become repetitive if overused.

Finally, the more pressing issue for me in this passage is that I'm a bit confused about what's going on. Is "I" the same person as "Pandora"? [Note: this related to an earlier version of the question - it is now clear that "I" is Pandora's thoughts]. I'm assuming so, and that the rest of the passage is about the man and the little girl that Pandora is watching (although in the last paragraph we seem to be in the little girl's perspective, which was a bit too abrupt a change in viewpoint for my liking). To help catch these issues, you could arrange with a friend to read and edit each other's writing. - but make sure it's someone whose writing skills you trust!

In that case, you could also make use of Acid Kritana's suggestion to replace some pronouns with nouns or noun phrases - you can get away with saying "the man" and "the girl" more often when it's coming from the perspective of someone who doesn't know who they are. Just be cautious about doing this when the viewpoint character does know. For example, if Pandora recognises the man as her friend Johnny, she's not going to talk about "the man", she's going to say "Johnny" and "he", and that's not a problem at all.

Good luck!

Answer 2

It does seem like a couple too many of pronoun usage, but using them most of the time wouldn't necessarily hurt. Just replace it with other words, such as man, and combine some sentences.