“Too much stage direction” is a critique I’ve received but didn’t really understand. So I read up on it. Yes, in fact, I was doing that on purpose and will now go edit it out. Fine.
This is one of those things where it’s not a creative choice. It’s just bad form, and the price of entry is: be better at it than you are. Do it again.
Conventional wisdom suggests we should let our work rest after writing it. Then, come back to it after we’ve had a chance to forget it a bit. During that time, if we continue working on the craft and remain engaged in other projects, we can expect to return to the original work better for the delay. Can confirm.
“Make every word count,” or some variant like “place each word deliberately,” is also fair critique. Now that’s I’ve gone through the “just stick in on the page” phase, I have to remove much of what was stuck because it’s crap. So, I remove it and am happy to do so, but what remains? I guess that’s what it means when I hear, “writing is re-writing.”