It is agony.

I may end up with ten or a dozen versions of the same scene and not know which one strikes the right balance.

How do you deal with this sort of obsessive preoccupation?

Find a reader you trust, and ask him or her to go through one of your works and cross out everything that seems to be excess description or explanation.

Revise your manuscript to make it flow smoothly without the parts that your reader crossed out.

Compare the two word counts and divide the number of words you cut by the original word count. This will give what's called the "lard factor." (For example, if a 1000-word piece gets cut to 600, then your lard factor is 400/1000, or 40%.)

You might want to do the same thing with several pieces to establish an average lard factor.

Then, when editing a piece on your own, you'll have a target word count: original word count minus the lard factor.

Over time, you'll probably start writing with less of a lard factor to begin with, so you'll need to adjust for that eventually.

Remember, as an author you have to make some stylistic choices. For example, one of my rule I rarely break is the use of "----- said" as a dialogue tag. I only use something else when the emotion of what is being unsaid is clear.

As a writer, you have to decide how much description you think is necessary. If you like stories with a lot of description, then write stories with a lot of description. And don't worry so much about being obvious. If anything, it's better to be obvious than to be opaque. You don't want your reader wondering what you're trying to say.

Finally, how to tell which scene is best. I think you're going about it the wrong way. You should look at your scenes not so much in terms of what's there, but in terms of emotional effect. The more moving a scene the better. Period. Choose your scenes that way. What you'll often find is that the emotional effect you trying to get at will help you determine how much you should put in or take out. The sadder the scene, the slower you want it to go, and so you need to have more details to slow it down. But for more energetic scenes, you don't want so many details becasue you want to focus on the action.

Also, look at the movies. You can actually have "slow motion" scenes by going into more detials--what the characters see, touch, smell, even taste. What they think. How they move. An entire paragraph that slows everything down to create an emotional punch. In the same way, you can speed everything up by dropping a lot of these details.

Let life be your guide. In high energy situaions, you tend to notice less because you're focused on the actions. But in emotionally charged situations--espeically ones that never seem to end--you tend to notice more because you're avoiding the real issues.

So I wouldn't worry so much about being overly descriptive or terse, as much as I would about trying to understand the emotional impact of the scene--what you want your readers to feel--and the pacing of a scene. If you focus on that, then how much or how little is easier to answer.

[This message has been edited by Balthasar (edited August 29, 2004).]

I think Balthasr has a good point too. Whatever it takes to get your point across, and get it across clearly makes sense.

Nevertheless, I tend to suffer from the same demons EJS and Phanto do in that my stories are oftentimes too quickly pased or concise. So when I edit I often end up expanding them...and often I go too far with that.

So it's your problem in reverse.

And there's where I think Balthasar has some good tips. What's the emotion of the scene and does each word and phrase support that emotion or does it pull you away. Sometimes that will mean adding more detail and description, othertimes it may mean paring it down a bit.