Hypocrisy? Guilty. Inconsistency? I plead Walt Whitman.
Too many words, too much description, too many details. Novice writers hear it all the time. Even a prolific, best-selling author like Joyce Carol Oates is guilty of purple prose and repetition and verbal excess.
I wince at the thought of all the red ink I've inflicted on others. When my own words are drenched in red, I feel the impact of someone else telling me I could tell my story better. E.g., I wrote:
The scent of gas and burnt oil was always faintly lingering, like the sweat of an engine hard at work.
The authoritative editor wrote:
The gas and burnt oil scent always lingering faintly like a sweating engine working hard.
Why does he think this sounds better? He explains:
Always look to replace a passive verb (to be) with active verb. So I'd rework to:
The gas and burnt oil scent always lingering faintly...
like the sweat of an engine hard at work.
Weeding prepositions out of text -- particularly short ones -- can
often tighten it to something stronger. So I'd tighten this to:
like a sweating engine working hard.
So your sentence becomes:
The gas and burnt oil scent always lingering faintly like a sweating
engine working hard.
Fifteen words instead of twenty with more active verbs and tighter syntax. Less is more.
Less is more. Yes.
But rhythm and momentum, narrative voice, may be sacrificed for the sake of word economy, and then all that's left is sawdust.
I'll ditch "was always lingering" for a more active verb tense. But when fiction workshoppers line-edit almost every paragaph of my novel, I just shut down, crawl off, and go outside to pull more weeds.