Draft 3: the hunt for bad writing habits

How I use the mid-stage of revision to find and eliminate the slag

A few months ago, I was visiting my parents and, as I tend to do while snuggling with their dogs on the sofa or screened-in porch, tinkering with a writing project.

My dad asked what I was working on. “Editing,” I told him. “I’m rewriting the third draft of my mystery.”

He thought about this for a few minutes, then asked: “What do you do when you edit?”

I considered this. “At this stage, it’s about making the story tighter, streamlining the language, and improving the pacing. I’m trying to make the story less ‘baggy.’”

This made sense to him. As a lifelong craftsman, he treats sanding and finishing as the final stage of bringing a piece together—no rough edges or gaps, everything fitting cleanly.

As I thought more about his question, it occurred to me that this mid-stage of revision—after the hot-mess first draft and early rewrites, but before the line-edit—is about hunting down my writing gremlins: the bad habits that slip in when I’m drafting fast and loose.

Zapping my gremlins

My writing software (Scrivener) has a feature called “zap gremlins,” which removes hidden characters that can jam things up later. I think of that as a metaphor for this round of editing: eliminating the invisible junk I stick in without noticing. Every writer has these habits. The job is to know them, then zap them.

Here are mine:

Gratuitous adverbs

When I write first drafts, I let myself sink into the melody and rhythm of the language. Exquisite “ly” modifiers play prettily (ugh, ZAP) for that purpose. Later, I take most of them out. Adverbs are often redundant and also best replaced by “showing” emotion or behavior.

Repetitive non-verbal actions

To create tension and draw out pacing, I add a lot of beats in my dialog where my characters tend to look at each other. She looks at him. He stares at her. They gaped at each other. They also raise their eyebrows, grin, roll their eyes, shrug, grimace, frown, and sigh. (So much sighing.) I perform global document searches to detect and pare down these fillers.

Nonsense phrases

Speaking of fillers, my characters also pad their conversations with words that take up space but don’t add anything. They love to say “of course,” “frankly,” “honestly,” “definitely,” and “seriously.” They use each other’s names a lot when they start sentences. All of that junk comes out in the third draft.

Overexplaining

In my first draft, I’m literally (ZAP) telling the story to myself. To drive home a point, I tend to reiterate it, saying the same thing different ways.

A recent first-draft example:

“You’re depressed,” Nicki tells him. “You’ve been depressed, probably for two or three years now, but it’s gotten really bad this year. It’s not abnormal, at this stage in life, to feel like this. I think talking about it with someone, and getting some coping strategies, would be wonderful for you.”

When I edit this, it’ll probably end up as:

“You’ve been depressed for a couple of years, but it’s gotten bad lately,” Nicki says. “It’s normal at this stage in life, but getting some coping strategies could help you.”

Time jumps

I like to start chapters with compelling statements that pull readers into the moment, but then I ruin it by reversing and sticking in all the background leading up to that moment. Plus, I often reveal major plot turns through flashbacks. This can be disorienting to readers, and it stalls the story instead of propelling it forward. When I edit, I pull the story back into the present.

Proportion problems

I can’t always sense what’s necessary to move characters from point A to B to C, so I fill in the gaps with too much detail. In Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, authors Renni Brown and Dave King explain why this is problem: “When you fill in all the details and leave nothing to your readers’ imaginations, you are patronizing them.” In editing, I focus on cutting, then cutting again.

Know your habits

What are your worst habits as a writer? There’s no shame here—we all have them! I’ve found that creating a checklist of these, and knowing how to search or read for them actively (ZAP), smoothes the revision phase and can cut down on the number of drafts.