There are lots of bad habits that can mess up a manuscript, but here are three that often show up in early drafts.
ONE: Exclamation marks
Don’t use them.
You can always go back and sprinkle some in later but try to get away with as few as possible. They are a crutch and each time you use one their effect is diminished. Avoiding them will force you to be a better word-selector.
TWO: Fancy and extended dialogue tags
Don’t laden your dialogue tags with description, (ie she said angrily as she took a sip of her hot cider). The words you put in your character’s mouth should imply the power of their wants/needs/loves/hates and the dialogue itself is implicit action, or SHOWING, whereas dumping info into the dialogue tag is by definition TELLING — and should be avoided.
A quick way of cleaning up about 60% of this is to do a global search on “ily” because you’ll find a lot of the adverbs that way and adverbs are all about telling. Trust your power of good dialogue and avoid the temptation of second-guessing yourself by adding into the dialogue tag what you already make clear with your choice of words and tone in what your characters say. Less is more.
THREE: Dialogue instead of scenes
Do you have pages of solid dialogue? This is a red flag for action that happened in the past. If you find sections of your story that are almost entirely dialogue, check it to see if you’re using dialogue as a scene avoidance technique. While conversation is nominally action, over dependence on dialogue is a way to unconsciously avoid writing a scene.
Every paragraph in a story should include at least one powerful action event. Don’t waste action potential on a scene with two heads yakking at each other after the fact. Plunge your scene in the middle of the action, and then chase your characters, keyboard in hand. Your readers will thank you for that.
