An Overused "Then"

One of my earlier posts was on how you want to limit adverbs. For me, adverbs can be unavoidable.

Just very recently, in my Camp NaNoWriMo novel for this month, I felt like I was using "then" a lot. So I did a word search and found over 80 results. Over 80! I couldn't believe it! 80 of the words in my novel were "then!"

So I looked for each "then" and found that a lot of them were unnecessary. I spent a few minutes cutting back on them and managed to get them down to around 40.

This same problem, except with the adverb "suddenly," happened with my November 2011 NaNoWriMo novel.

Remember: Adverbs are okay to use in writing, but limit them. Also, you can use them in dialogue.

(Hey, why not play a fun game. Find all the adverb from this post and copy them into a comment.)