“If you have serious doubts about how long a given scene should be, I think your best course would be to write it for all you think it might possibly be worth. Novels that a publisher considers too long – but are excellent in all other respects – will usually attract an editor’s invitation to “boil.” But the scene you underdeveloped – so that it lost its potential dramatic punch – will not get the publisher’s attention at all, and your manuscript will simply be rejected. In my own teaching experience, fifty manuscripts fail because of scenic underdevelopment for every one that fails because the scenes were written too long.”