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I'm "almost done" with the editing of the submission draft of A MAGIC OF NIGHTFALL, my current work-in-progress. Not that I'm done with the editing entirely, mind you. Sheila, my editor, will now read it and have her own comments and suggestions, and the manuscript will go through another intense pass, and then there's the copy-edit to look forward to...
But the truth is, I could probably revise the manuscript forever...
A brief anecdote: way back when, I was a Fine Arts student in college. I had a fabulous painting instructor at the time: Bob Fabe, a local artist. One day, I was laboring over a tempera painting I'd been working on for a few weeks. I could feel Bob standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. He watched for a time as I was painting, making tiny little changes. Suddenly, as I reached for another brush, he rapped me across the back of the head with his open hand. "Ow!" I said, annoyed, looking back at him. "What the hell was that for?"
He was grinning at me. "You're done," he said. "You're just moving paint around now without accomplishing anything. Every artist need to have someone standing behind them with a baseball bat to hit them over the head when they're done, or they keep working and working until they ruin it. You're done."
As it turned out, in later years I became much more interested in writing fiction than creating fine art, but I still think of that incident -- because I know that what Bob said is true for me and writing. I can look at a paragraph I've labored over for half an hour and still make some change. I can go over a scene ten times, read it the next day and decide that it might be better if I tried this. I'll read work I've published and want to have it back so I can change this phrase or that piece of dialogue. In some sense, I'm never done. If I let myself, I could revise endlessly. I would always make some change in what I've written.
But at some point, you have to stop and send the damn thing out... or you end up never being published. I'm just not sure where that point should be. For me, there's rarely a real 'baseball bat' moment, no time when I rise up in delight and proclaim "Aha! It's finished!" There's mostly a sense of being 'exhausted'...
So how is it with you? Do you have the "Aha!" moments? Does the Muse use a metaphorical baseball bat on your head? How do you know when you're 'done'?
But the truth is, I could probably revise the manuscript forever...
A brief anecdote: way back when, I was a Fine Arts student in college. I had a fabulous painting instructor at the time: Bob Fabe, a local artist. One day, I was laboring over a tempera painting I'd been working on for a few weeks. I could feel Bob standing behind me, looking over my shoulder. He watched for a time as I was painting, making tiny little changes. Suddenly, as I reached for another brush, he rapped me across the back of the head with his open hand. "Ow!" I said, annoyed, looking back at him. "What the hell was that for?"
He was grinning at me. "You're done," he said. "You're just moving paint around now without accomplishing anything. Every artist need to have someone standing behind them with a baseball bat to hit them over the head when they're done, or they keep working and working until they ruin it. You're done."
As it turned out, in later years I became much more interested in writing fiction than creating fine art, but I still think of that incident -- because I know that what Bob said is true for me and writing. I can look at a paragraph I've labored over for half an hour and still make some change. I can go over a scene ten times, read it the next day and decide that it might be better if I tried this. I'll read work I've published and want to have it back so I can change this phrase or that piece of dialogue. In some sense, I'm never done. If I let myself, I could revise endlessly. I would always make some change in what I've written.
But at some point, you have to stop and send the damn thing out... or you end up never being published. I'm just not sure where that point should be. For me, there's rarely a real 'baseball bat' moment, no time when I rise up in delight and proclaim "Aha! It's finished!" There's mostly a sense of being 'exhausted'...
So how is it with you? Do you have the "Aha!" moments? Does the Muse use a metaphorical baseball bat on your head? How do you know when you're 'done'?
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Deadlines.
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Deadlines
I find that I make changes even after I send the book in for copyediting. And then I make smaller changes when the manuscript comes back. And even smaller changes during the galley and proofreading process. As the MS moves towards a book, the size of the changes shrinks until I can only make changes that are unobservable to the naked eye.
And then I stop.
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Re: Deadlines
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Re: Deadlines
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Re: Deadlines
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I work in IT and we do monthly reports as well as proposals for solutions to business needs. I would spend hours putting together each document. My director sat down with me and talked about "Return on Investment". If the bulk of the content was in place after an hour, and I invest 6 more hours polishing every nuance of every sentence, then I'm not getting 7 hours worth of value out of my time. He suggested I consider the initial draft plus 1 or 2 reviews, then stop. At that point, the return on any further investment is all but nil.
What's funny is that it took me 30 minutes to finalize this comment. I guess I still need to work on that ROI thing :)
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I am an endless reviser. No doubt I've revised sentences so much they've gone back to their original incarnation. Everything you said rang a very familiar bell for me. :) Particularly reading work that is already published, and wanting it back to revise it. That happens every time I read something of mine that's already "out there".
So I revise over and over, as I write, and then when I write "the end" I let it sit at least overnight, and go through again fresh with a fine-toothed comb. Once I've done that "final" revision, I read it again. Then, unless I just really feel like there's a huge problem to fix, I close my eyes and hit 'send'. Usually because the deadline is HERE.
It does help immensely when there is someone reading over my shoulder who says "you're done". Debbie's great about that. I would truly just keep making changes forever if I didn't have her holding the baseball bat, or
have The Deadline to meet.
This is also one of the reasons that novel-length work has been very challenging for me. Argh! Working on fixing THAT this year. :)
Oddly, I'm much more able to recognize the "you're done" moment in painting. This could be due to the type of painting I do, but I just find it so much easier to hit that "ah ha" moment with painting where the whole just feels right. On an interesting note, I'm also much happier with my paintings when I'm done with them, than my stories. :/ As a rule. I'm happy while I'm painting, I'm happy when I'm done. Then, even if I look at the painting a week or two later and say "oh, that's not really what I was going for", I still remember the delight of the painting experience and I can let it go and just appreciate it.
Whereas with writing... ehn, not so much. ;) I read it later and screech in horror, no matter how much fun I had writing it or how happy I was in the moment.
And now that I've reread this comment four times and corrected my errors and revised my sentences, I'll hit post.
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*giggle
I did the same thing. And I shall resist, no matter how strong, the urge to edit this one. *post
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Thank you so much. :)
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It's a combination of deadline and reaching the point where I honestly cannot tell if any of the little changes I'm making are actually doing any good. At that point, I'm usually in the send this to the editor now frame of mind which is not entirely cheerful -- but I guess in some sense, she's the baseball bat.
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A.
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Anne