writing this for my own benefit: quickly disentangle yourself from the utterly abysmal advice that overly using -ly adverbs makes your writing fundamentally worse
it doesn't. it is not important any more than "overusing said." stop second guessing yourself and write!
This kind of advice is good when it's coming from an editor going over a manuscript that's done and yeah when they have to deal with a problem that you've presented them but that's a totally different problem to 'get something written and done,' which is by far a more important hurdle to clear than 'but what if I improve the word quality 1%' editorial choices
Yep!!!
A ton of the most common pearls of Writing Wisdom along these lines are calling out details you polish after you've written something, because that's when you can look at the entire sentence and all the sentences around it and decide whether or not it works as a whole.
Let's say I have a character who sings loudly. I was told--like I'm sure plenty of us who have heard this chestnut were told--that this is a lazy way to write and I should come up with a more descriptive way to say it. Cool! I can have them bellow like an elephant seal when I'm cleaning the whole thing up if I think the sentence could be more dynamic. In the meantime, I know what I meant by "loudly."
Maybe it needs some extra detail because another character was singing shyly a sentence or two ago and after reading it all at once it stands out as repetitive. Or maybe I end up leaving "loudly" there because I already added some interesting detail and this is a quick glimpse at minor characters we'll never see again. Maybe I only have 150 characters and it's not worth running over. Maybe I'm bored of fucking with this sentence readers will spend .5 seconds on and have better shit to do. There are all kinds of decisions I could make there, but they're best made after I know what I'm saying, which means writing it down first.
I love storytelling, but I used to hate writing because I felt like every time I'd sit down and spend hours on 1k words, then go back and read it and find it so godawful I'd have to scrap most of it. It was mostly because I was writing like someone was looking over my shoulder and slapping my hand every time I did something I knew was Wrong, and I'd try to fix it in the moment. So none of it hung together right, because I'd never get a complete thought out before going back and reworking it into something else. Usually that something else was dogshit, because I was trying to avoid an imaginary scolding by writing what I thought my imaginary critic wanted to read instead of focusing on what I wanted to communicate.
Writing is ultimately just a series of decisions, and it's kind of wild how many writers I've talked to who had to teach ourselves that--I'm not sure if it's because a lot of us seem to have had writing advice distributed to us in the form of more established writers venting about pet peeves? But early drafts are not bad because that's where we make all the inevitable hack errors that we could fix in the moment if we were better writers; they're how we figure out what the complete picture is so we can make the next set of decisions.