Editing

I have been trying to learn the art of editing and come to difficult conclusions, though the first is simple enough. Any first draft, especially one written by me, will require pruning. And the same is true of any second draft. After that the issues arise.

It is surely inefficient to write a great deal which later needs to be excised. Although this seems obvious I'm not sure it is. The excess may well mean that the author has fully realised character and scene for himself, which is desirable. If some of that work is later withheld from the reader it may still have a beneficial effect on what remains.

Another issue troubles me a lot. I have heard it said that we live in a digital age, which I took to mean an age where things happen rapidly and attention spans are short. The speaker implied that we remember this in our writing - that we don't hang around, that we keep things moving. But if we write and edit with this in mind we might end up cutting too much flesh from the bone.
Who wants to curl up with a skeleton?

A spare, lean style can be very effective, but is that the only style open to us now? Can't we be expansive any more? And are digressions out of the question? I hope not. Yet I notice that some queries are doomed from the start on word count alone. So I would guess that if an author wants to be expansive these days, he/she will only have a chance of doing it when established.
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Musical Notes
Normally, we edit to improve a text, but sometimes the desire to edit can be problematic. It can happen that an author or composer edits compulsively and doesn't know when to stop. Henri Duparc was a case in point, being unable to leave a good song alone. On other occasions the problem is one of quality control. Cases of this include Brahms, Paul Dukas and Jean Sibelius.

Early on in his career Sibelius doubted the quality of his work, withdrawing Kullervo soon after its first performance. He had well known problems with the violin concerto and the fifth symphony and felt that, even after heavy revision, the fifth symphony was not entirely successful. He also had doubts about Tapiola.The worst case was the eight symphony, on which he expended a great deal of work before burning what there was of it - evidently a great deal. There is no way of knowing if his instinct was right about the eighth syphony, but I believe he was correct about the other works.

But maybe he took it all too seriously. He could have adopted a more relaxed attitude, done his best with a given work and left it to listeners to decide. Many imperfect works are enjoyable. Why deprive us of pleasure because you take yourself too seriously? Renoir didn't. He kept painting after arthritis weakened his technique. The art market hated that, but why would he care? Painting was what he did.