To understand the difference between a good adverb and a bad adverb, consider these two sentences: "She smiled happily" and "She smiled sadly." Which one works best? The first seems weak because "smiled" contains the meaning of "happily." On the other hand, "sadly" changes the meaning. Remember the song Killing Me Softly? Good adverb. How about "Killing Me Fiercely"? Bad adverb. Look also for weak verb-adverb combinations that you can revise with stronger verbs: "She went quickly down the stairs" can become "She dashed down the stairs." "He listened surreptitiously" can become "He eavesdropped." Give yourself a choice.

"Writing Tools" by Roy Peter Clark

Not every scene you write has to be essential to drive your plot forward...your story doesn't need to be at high stakes at all times to be considered interesting, either. Your scenes, that you include, should always be crucial to your story...[s]o, yes, it is important that your story isn't filled with scenes that don't affect or drive your plot forward, but it is also okay to include scenes in which your characters simply...exist.

...it might be necessary to have your characters invite a couple friends over, make some pancakes, and crack some jokes! A scene like that, while it might not contribute much to the overall plot of your story, will help bring life into it! Giving your audience glimpses into your characters life, not only helps them connect with your characters, but it's a way for them to start caring more deeply about both your characters and the relationship between them.

Your story CANNOT simply be ACTION ACTION ACTION...YOUR PLOT IS ONLY HALF OF [YOUR STORY]. If a scene is rendered useless in terms of plot development, but contributes in any way to the development of a character or relationship, it is not useless, nor is it a waste of space! ...Every scene has to serve a purpose, but there is a lot of purposes to be served.

screnwriter-old-deactivated2021 on Tumblr

Nothing illustrates darkness as well as sparse and brilliant highlights. If you want to write a character with an unspeakably awful past, there’s no need to go into deep and gory details about how horrible it was. Readers who can’t relate to it won’t relate to that, and the readers who have been there generally don’t want to see that. Instead, highlight some of their happiest moments but make them unsettlingly small. Sprinkles in some realism, too. Having a character go "my parents were abusive monsters and I’ve literally never had a happy moment in my life" isn’t realistic, and both the people who haven’t witnessed that kind of thing outside of fiction, and the people who have personally lived it will just go "yeah, yeah, tragic childhood, misery, darkness, we’ve all seen it", and being nothing but negative makes the character both uninteresting and unlikeable.

Now, having someone casually think or say shit like "I think my happiest childhood memory was that christmas when dad was in prison. Nobody was yelling or throwing anything and mom was sober the whole time", and be genuinely surprised by other peoples’ concerned reactions - now jesus christ that’s bleak.

if you do it right, you can simultaneously drop such a scene to be darkly comedic and bleak.

homunculus-argument, et al. on Tumblr

One of the best tips for writing descriptions of pain is actually a snippet I remember from a story where a character is given a host of colored pencils and asked to draw an egg. The character says that there’s no white pencil. But you don’t need a white pencil to draw a white egg. We already know the egg is white. What we need to draw is the luminance of the yellow lamp and the reflection of the blue cloth and the shadows and the shading.

We know a broken bone hurts. We know a knife wound hurts. We know grief hurts. Show us what else it does. You don’t need to describe the character in pain. You need to describe how the pain affects the character - how they’re unable to move, how they’re sweating, how they’re cold, how their muscles ache and their fingers tremble and their eyes prickle.

Draw around the egg. Write around the pain. And we will all be able to see the finished product.

iwhumpyou on Tumblr

Stuck in a scene and don't know where to go next? Do what the pros do: Put what happens in brackets. [Our hero escapes death by doing something clever.] Then write what happens after that. Keeping your writing momentum is key. Often you'll find the answer later in the work [...] Every time I post about bracketing and moving on, invariably a dozen or so people joke about putting the whole story in brackets and I have to be, like, "Yeah, we call that an outline, and it's totally cool to do."

@Massawyrm on Twitter

Imagine the character [you're acting] is a real person who can only live again when someone plays them. They’re desparate to be alive. To connect with people. To breathe. To see. To touch. Only you have the power to give that to them. Now get on with it and leave your worrying about yourself.

@michaelsheen on Twitter