/lit/ - Literature

I feel like I can't write naturally anymore. My latest thing is that I'm too concerned if I'm using too many "to be" verbs or not. The first novel of my series was written in a relaxed, almost colloquial style, but my second sounds stilted at some points because I refuse to use the word "was" when it would fit best. It also has a problem with sentences being longer than they should be, because I was trying to bump up my Flesch-Kincaid score from 4.5 (which, I realize now, was mostly because my dialogue used super short sentences). Trying to fix this all in editing.