Some easy writing advice to follow, offered all the time, is show instead of tell. But it takes careful work to remove showing at the same time you remove barrier words from your writing. Barrier words are ones that make a story less vivid and make the writer more obvious.
You don't want the latter to happen. We tell stories, but we don't want our readers to focus on us as storytellers. (Write memoirs or essays if you want to be seen while you tell the story.) Fiction has several key elements, and few of them give writers a reason to show themselves telling. Not even in first person.
Make a list of these barrier words and post it close at hand:
You rarely need these in fiction's narrative writing. (In dialogue you can do almost anything—but the dialogue still has to propel the plot, or reinforce character traits, or make extra conflict. Reflection, as with these barrier words, is not a great mission for dialogue. At the hardest end of the barrier word-cutting, thought and decided can be erased by first-person limited point of view.
He thought he could wrestle the gun from Steiner's hand.
becomes
He could wrestle the gun from Steiner's hand.
At the easiest,
Randolph saw the wagon sink in the mud
becomes
The wagon sank in the mud. (There are other sentences to let us know it's Randolph doing the watching.)
Let a reader observe the action itself in the writing. Visuals rarely need watched and saw. Sensations like smell (one of my favorites) should be unique or pungent enough to stand without the verb smelled. The fuzzy one is felt: it's almost useful while you describe a texture. But the stubble on his chin felt rough can easily become The stubble on his chin was rough.
Go through and check your writing during revision. After a while, you won't write even first drafts using these barrier words.
