I once spent three days editing a debut novel where the author had clearly spent more time reading travel brochures than actually observing the world. Every single page was choked with adjectives—the cerulean sky, the fragrant jasmine, the ancient cobblestones—until the setting felt less like a living environment and more like a heavy, expensive velvet curtain suffocating the characters. Most writing gurus will tell you that sensory detail is the magic key, but they forget to mention that if you don’t know how to write about place with surgical precision, you’re just inflating your word count and making your future…

I once spent three weeks editing a debut thriller where the author had clearly spent too much time watching prestige cinema and not enough time actually writing. Every single page was choked with adjectives; the protagonist didn’t just walk into a room, they “navigated the amber-hued, mahogany-scented sanctuary of the study with a heavy, melancholic gait.” It was exhausting to read, and frankly, it was a waste of the publisher’s budget. Most writing gurus will tell you that sensory detail is the soul of fiction, but they forget to mention that when you overstuff the prose, you stall the narrative…