There are a few writer-world problems you can have. The muse taking an extended break. Losing a month’s worth of progress to backup failure. Realizing the “unique” book idea you’ve been working on for five years was just published by someone else.

Then there’s writer-problems you can fix. Learning how to show and not tell, eliminating your staging, and as this blog will explore, curbing the need to overwrite.

6 Ways To Stop Overwriting Your Stories

In the first draft, I underwrite. It’s all about getting the story out and doing it quickly with basic sentences. In the next couple of drafts, I go the other way, making up for all the basic-ness by cramming every word I can into a sentence.

As you can imagine, that ups my word count but leaves my MS a bloated mess. To deflate it and get to the heart…