Step away from your current project as long as you can bear it—then wait an additional week. You’ll need that emotional distance before you revisit your work.

Put your manuscript on a diet. Pare down or eliminate scenes that don’t further the story. Examine plot points, characters, description, dialogue and exposition, until you have precisely what you need to tell your story, and not a character or subplot more. Then apply this same philosophy to your work at the sentence level, killing your darlings and eliminating excessive adjectives and adverbs, along with verbose descriptions. Bring out the flavor of both your story and your style, but stop short of overseasoning.

Seek the help of beta readers, critique groups and editors. In return for the valuable feedback you receive, share your growing skills by critiquing the works of other participants in return.

Thanks for that. I've found a good way to remove my darlings without 'killing' them: anything which I like but doesn't work gets cut-and-pasted into a word document. I just checked and that document is 78000 words and counting.

Of course, it's extremely satisfying when text gets cut-and-pasted the other way!!