As a professional novelist, the best advice I can give comes from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.” He was known to rewrite his short stories up to 30 times. So, rewrite. It helps to let some time pass (at least a few days) before you reread and rewrite a text. This makes it easier to spot the weak parts.
For me, rewriting often means cutting things out that aren’t really necessary. That hurts, because I have put some effort into putting the words there in the first place. So I use a simple trick to overcome my reluctance: I don’t just delete the text, but cut it out and copy it into a seperate document for each novel, called “cutouts”. That way, I can always reverse my decision to cut things out or maybe reuse parts later, and I don’t have the feeling that the work is “lost”. Of course, I rarely reuse those cutouts.
I also agree with the other answers regarding reader feedback, short sentences, etc. All of this is part of the rewriting process.
As a professional novelist, the best advice I can give comes from one of the greatest writers of the 20th century, Ernest Hemingway: “The first draft of anything is shit.” He was known to rewrite his short stories up to 30 times. So, rewrite. It helps to let some time pass (at least a few days) before you reread and rewrite a text. This makes it easier to spot the weak parts.
For me, rewriting often means cutting things out that aren’t really necessary. That hurts, because I have put some effort into putting the words there in the first place. So I use a simple trick to overcome my reluctance: I don’t just delete the text, but cut it out and copy it into a seperate document for each novel, called “cutouts”. That way, I can always reverse my decision to cut things out or maybe reuse parts later, and I don’t have the feeling that the work is “lost”. Of course, I rarely reuse those cutouts.
I also agree with the other answers regarding reader feedback, short sentences, etc. All of this is part of the rewriting process.