Re-entry

Museum trips, board games, long meals--these have eaten up my available writing time the past 10 days while family was visiting. Re-entry into my writing life feels very clumsy at the moment. I've tried to visit a few blogs to get back in the swing. Christine over at the Writer's Hole has a fun link I played with. You insert text samples and the algorithm matches your style to that of famous authors. I consistently got either James Joyce or Chuck Palanhnuik. :-D

Re-entry also meant re-reading critiques on these last chapters I need to revise. I've already made needed cuts two weeks ago, and it was pretty painless. My current to-do list includes expanding two dialogue scenes that are too fast paced. I'm finding this quite a weird challenge. I tend to overwrite in draft, then cut repeatedly in revision. I've gone back to earlier drafts of these scenes and found very little worth re-introducing. I guess it's time to pull out the el-cheapo spiral notebook and freewrite a bunch of new material, then revise it down to something useful.

What's your process for expanding a thin scene? Does plumping in revision come naturally? Or do you, like me, need to treat it more like "back to the drawing board"?