Yeah, I'm halfway though revising a novel at the moment and I've already passed on more than 5k into my discarded passages file. I hope to keep it under 10k, otherwise I'll cry a bit.
I tend to underwrite a scene, description-wise, but my first drafts tend to be loooooooooong. No kidding my work in progress is in chapter 35 and I still haven't got the ending yet. Where's the hair pulling emoji? I guess this one works lol. I tend to do that and the next day, and the next day, and the next day thing during the first draft. I create situations that I feel need an immediate resolution -- ahem -- new scenes. Second draft is when I start to perform a squish -- scenes get turned into paragraphs of exposition or dumped. I also sometimes forget when I've introduced information and find in the reread that I've written it into multiple scenes which means I can decide where it sounds better. Earlier or later. In my WIP I have two instances where the Mc's mother talks to the director about the boy's father once before they become intimate and once after. Now I have to decide where the placement best fits the story.
Oh, cool! So you have a lot going on plotwise and character-wise... I smell a series. O, yes, the repetitive stuff. I suffer from that too, even though my first drafts are on the short side, so I can definitely understand that it happens in longer stuff. Cutting scenes like that is not too bad, but deciding where to put the one that remains... that can also require some hair-puilling on occasion. We definitely need that hairpulling-emoji, we're writers, darn it! I loved to hear how you work, and I hope you have so much fun with your story this winter.
Underwriting means you sacrifice information for the sake of brevity. Being concise is much more important, where you're brief for the sake of clarity. It's a very fine line, and as someone who swears by concise writing, I find myself swaying.
