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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31250
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/31250
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

First and foremost, I would suggest that you resist the urge to describe everything that happens in a scene. In a movie, all the actions of a scene like that are acted out and are visible on screen, though it might take several viewings before you actually saw everything that every actor was doing. But that is the nature of how we operate in the world. We don't take in every detail of every action of every person in every moment of our lives. We practice selective attention. Without selective attention, we would not be able to function in the busy complex noisy environments we live in. (Defects in our ability to practice selective attention can be debilitating disorders making it impossible for people to live normal lives.)

So, a movie can throw all that detail up on screen and allow the viewer's natural talent for selective attention to take in the scene as they will. If they did not saturate the scene in that way, I suspect, the viewer would find the scene very unnatural, even though they are not actually taking in all the details of the busy scene.

But prose is very different. Prose forces each word and sentence into the foreground one at a time. It gives the reader little opportunity for practicing selective attention (except by skipping, and we obviously don't want to encourage that). So the writer has to practice selective attention on the reader's behalf. Much of the power of the novel as an art form lies in this as it allows the writer to direct the reader's attention to a greater degree than any other art form.

But it also means that we must work very hard to make sure that we only bring forward those elements of a scene that really matter. Detail for detail's sake, detail to show off how keen an observer you are, is never a good thing. Detail must serve the arc and theme of the story. Neither brevity not richness is a virtue in itself, it is all about how the details chosen and the way they are presented serve the arc and theme of the story.

If your text seem repetitive, therefore, the problem is very likely not in the prose but in the choice of detail. Choose the right detail and the prose you choose to express it is not the first concern. Simple and straightforward is usually best, but even that is not the make or break concern. It is all about choosing the right detail to show, much more than it is about the right way to show it.

No one could say for certain which details in the passage you shared are the right ones, because that depends on the larger context of the story, but it seems to me that much of what is there is mere busy detail, not crucial to what is going on in the scene. Everything in a scene should mean something? Is that the case for your scene?

Original score: 9