Bad Habits

Here's today's Road Trip Wednesday question hosted by YA Highway:

Spring cleaning! What do you hope to "clean out" from your writing? What habits/tropes/words, etc do you want to eliminate?

Is it Spring already? I wish Alberta would get that memo.

Anyway, if I could clean out my writing, hoo-eee there would be quite a few words I'd eliminate. I know that's what revisions are for, but it would save me lots of time if I'd just stopping using them in the first place. Words like, just, so, well, yeah, really, etc. I also find I've got to revise a lot of things like I saw, I looked, I smelled, I heard, I wondered... When I'm writing a first draft, I'm in a hurry to get the story out, and those words get straight to the point. It's in revisions that I have to stretch and find better, more descriptive ways of saying stuff.


This doesn't have much to do with spring cleaning, but I've decided when I go back to the WIP I started ages ago, I'm going to plot a lot more before I start writing again. Usually I get a basic idea and then just wing it, but this leaves me with rounds and rounds of revisions. I'm hoping I can cut that back at least a teensy bit by digging deeper into the plot and characters before I even get started.

What habits would you like to eliminate? Maybe I can add them to my list.