In the publishing world, we have a term called “clutter.” It refers to the unnecessary adjectives and redundant phrases that hide the true meaning of a paragraph. Most people’s living rooms are full of the physical equivalent: the “adjectives” of past hobbies, the “adverbs” of guilt-tripped gifts, and the “filler words” of impulse buys. If you want to understand who you are today, you have to stop living in a museum of who you were five years ago. 1. The “Just in Case” Fiction The most dangerous phrase in the English language is “I might need this someday.” In editing, this is the equivalent of keeping a 2,000-word tangent in…