Knowing when to stop

Damon, from Bed­ford, Pa, asked, “You say you revise you books so many times. How do you know when to stop?”

A fair ques­tion. Since I don’t believe there is such a thing as a per­fect book, there is always some­thing to revise. The ques­tion is, are you mak­ing the writ­ing bet­ter? The point is, chang­ing this com­ma, that com­ma, this word, that word, may not make that much dif­fer­ence. And, frankly, when you get to this point it’s almost fun to make these tiny changes. It’s real­ly not that hard work—though I admit—sometimes it can make a dif­fer­ence. Still, I sus­pect that at a cer­tain point con­stant revis­ing is a way of avoid­ing start­ing a new book. Why go to the hard work of cre­at­ing a new book—when you can fid­dle with the old?

Over the year I’ve come to depend on the machin­ery of pub­li­ca­tion to tell me when to stop—the edi­tor say­ing “enough!” The copy edi­tor say­ing, “It looks fine to me,” and of course the pub­lish­ing dead­line which engages many peo­ple with their own deadlines—and real­ly, real­ly they do not want me to make those lit­tle changes.

Then too, there is that point—and it does happen—when you say, “I can’t look at this book again!” Quit­ting time.