Incomplete sentences do this to me. I've just finished a short HR. I couldn't have managed. Anything longer. Not when even the most ordinary statements. Seemed to be so important. That they were picked out this way. With a period. No verb.
Then there's the lone sentence.
Apparently, sitting a single sentence in the middle of white space makes the statement more important.
Unless the statement is important, the character from whose head issued the thought seems like a bore; self important, in other words. Sometimes these important single sentences are also partial sentences. I get a headache after a series of partial sentences and Very Important Statements.
Which leads me to the done-to-death actions to depict certain emotions. I have to say when I constantly read the same phrases over and over again in books, it makes my knuckles turn white. I lied. I can't ever make my knuckles turn white no matter how hard I clench my fists because bone is yellow. I have longed to write in a book, she clenched her fists until her knuckles turned yellow, but I can't because it would make me laugh. And of course. It would edited out.
Similarly I worry about heroines who lift their chins a notch. Too noisy. Click. Click. Oh, that's two. It should be only A notch. Click.
Back in the days when RWA (US) first discovered that writers could talk to each other via the internet, we had a single list for all, published and unpublished. This was fantastic for newbies like me, because I learnt 'the craft' from people who would have been my idols if I knew who they were. I didn't initially, not being a romance reader, but I got to know who knew what, and what they would share. They were an incredibly generous lot and we were a small group in the beginning.
One time, the general discussion was about who thought what was annoying or strange in books. Being such a newbie, I had to be careful because I didn't know who wrote what, but one day I mentioned the word 'loins.' Apparently, in historical romances when men heated with lust, pain shot through their loins. I said, tactful as usual, that I kept imagining that they were trying to pass a kidney stone. "What?" was screeched at me from a Very Famous Author.
I said, "Speaking as nurse who worked in a renal unit for a spell, I associate loins with kidney pain rather than lust." Other nurses chimed in, agreeing about loins. We even found a dictionary definition and someone who could recall the word from bible stories wherein children sprang from loins. We were very intellectual in those days. Anyway, the VFA said she would never use loins again. I have felt guilty about mentioning the word for years.
However (a partial sentence to show the importance of this next statement). When I read my batch of historical romances, I didn't see loin a single time. Back in those days, we collectively decided that groin was the word that should be used.
And, ta da. It now is!