u/Legitimate-Wear-6933

Hi everyone. I got some small issues on two things in my writing:

(1) filters: as if/as though/seem/like.

I might be using too much of these in my writing, so i was wondering should I fix it? I heard that filter words like these kills the immersion, for example:

"She tied her shoelaces as if it was the only thing that mattered."

should I change the above sentence to something like, i don't know, "She tied her shoelaces, wrapping slowly, weaving every loop..."

(2) POV head-hopping.

So basically I write in third person limited POV, and i understand that you could show the POV character's actions and thoughts, but you could only perceive the outer stuff of other characters. So I have this specific sentence:

"He (main POV) met her (other char) dreadful eyes."

Does this count as head-hopping? I mean, he should not be able to know that her eyes are dreadful, right? If I were gonna abide to the show-not-tell rule, I might change this to something like: "Her eyes looked away, her lips shivering." But this is also something I'm not sure, because the latter "show", can be interpreted as many emotions, like fear, rage, anxious, thrill even, so I'm torn at this.

Let me know what you guys think. Or maybe I'm just not thinking right...

...An edit. The above "dreadful" should be "fearful". So my question was about whether the main pov could perceive "fear"

Hi guys, I'm currently in the middle of drafting my fantasy novel, yet every time I go back to earlier chapters, they look like garbage and I just have this impulse to revise and edit it on the spot before carrying on. But when I go back again, they still look like garbage, and I basically lost the enthusiasm to write.

And it's not only that, whenever I go over the plots and scenes again, I just cannot bear the text and has this urge to rewrite, and my progress ends up going on forever. I swear im in my third or fourth rewrite already and it's burning me out. I work full-time so I need to squeeze my hours to write. I've been working on this for more than a year and it just seems never-ending.

How do you cope with this?