Weeding

When editing your first draft, you will always need to do some weeding.

Some of the names of the weeds growing in our gardens are:

just
really
a little
decided to
kind of
used to
even
actually
I felt
looked like
always

I suggest deleting them without even thinking about it. Every once in a while, these words serve a real purpose, but mostly they are red flags that scream "beginner" rather than "professional" and it would be a shame to have your writing ignored for something like that. You may be a good story-teller, after all.

When you're reading published authors, you may notice an occasional use of these words, but new writers always make the mistake of overusing these words, ad nauseum.

Trust that you don't need these modifiers as much as you think you do.

The problem with "decided to" is that once the character takes action, we already know what they decided to do. What if you kept saying, "she deliberated on her action"?

Once might be meaningful, but if you change "decided to" into "deliberated on," you will see how excessive it is.

Happy weeding!