Annoying Habits In My Writing (One Edit Down)

I've been through my novel once on paper and made tons of changes, so I'm just on the typed version deleting, adding in, and correcting everything before my second edit, which will involve a lot more new things going in and restructuring of the story and the way it's told. The first edit has helped me to identify a lot of terrible habits I have in my writing, that hopefully in the future I'll be able to cut out at the first draft. The biggest culprit is my gross overuse of the word "that": I must have deleted over a hundred "that" 's out of my 50,000 words, so many that every time I use the word now (like just then) I start worrying it's completely redundant and shouldn't be there. Very occasionally, "that" needs to be in a sentence but I've used it badly so many times I can't work out when it has a justifiable place in a sentence.

Another very common thing I do to clunk up my writing is use the word "would" or variations of it all the time, for instance saying "Ethan would tell us..." rather than "Ethan told us...". It's just adding in words for the sake of it, but my novel is littered with it, killing its impact. I think I just got a bit confused with tenses as I wrote the thing so fast. Even with a lot of stuff added in, I've already cut a thousand words and I'm only half way through the edit, so the whole thing must be becoming much more readable every day. I wish I had a little barometer like I did when my word count was going up each day as I initially wrote the story. With taking words out it's difficult to see exactly how much good you're doing, and I'll never be able to read it fresh and see the difference, as in my head the perfect version is already done, I just need to get it on the page.

Right now, I'm shocked that anyone can ever complete a novel, sit in front of a manuscript and say, yes, this is done, I'm not going to make any more changes to this. I'm a long way off that golden moment right now, but even when I get there I'm worried I'm not going to be able to let my novel go, that I'm going to want to skim it for "that" 's one last time. For now, that dilemma is way off in the future though, I've got a lot of work to do, a lot of unnecessary words to cut, and a lot of exciting new writing to add in.