As someone who dabbles in writing popular fiction, I follow 2,3,4 pretty religiously. Cut, simplify, active. Also avoiding adjectives and always try to "show do

As someone who dabbles in writing popular fiction, I follow 2,3,4 pretty religiously. Cut, simplify, active. Also avoiding adjectives and always try to "show don't tell". The rest...not so releavant for me. I guess I do 1 intuitively and "avoid clichees" but I'm not big on metaphors anyways as I write thrillers and try to avoid metaphors in general. I always cringe when I read gems like "he was dangling off the cliff like a sausage on a meethook". Honestly, I usually don't even care about the sentence level. Figure out overall structure, braindump and get things done, optimize. It's sort of similar to (my) programming now that I think about it. Build MVP, worry about details later. The better you are, the less details you have to worry about because you do things right intuitively. In talking to other people who write, I have learned that there are very different approaches. I'm a high level first kind of person and will obsess over structure and plot out everything before writing a single word. Others will just write and go with the flow, some are very pendantic and cannot continue until sentences or paragraphs are perfect, I mostly muddle along to fill the structure skeleton with some meat and then finetune after the first pass.