I already talked about how I’m looking at the pacing of the first half of the novel as I go through this draft. The next thing I’m looking for are the dreaded adverbs. I find that my writing, like many others, contains far too many of these weak links. In particular, I’ve that “clearly” invades my work way too often.
So my goal is to work around as many of the “ly”s as I can. If I can’t rewrite it without an “ly”, I have to decide if the word is needed (for example, as I was writing this sentence, I almost wrote “I have to decide if the word is really needed” and then changed “really” to “actually” and then realized that neither is needed).
I’m alright with the occasional adverb — sometimes they are the clearest, most concise way to make a point, but for the most part they are unnecessary.
Adverbs aren’t always bad; they have their place, but if you can write the sentence without the adverb, and if leaving out the adverb doesn’t harm the sentence, then you don’t need the adverb.
I have some trouble with “really” too, but my biggest nemesis seems to be the word “just.” I use that word way too often in my writing.
My problem is that I often use unnecessary adverbs. I find my overuse of clearly a little ironic too — when I use to tutor legal writing students, I always told them: “If it’s so clear, then you don’t need to use the word clearly.”