You’ve been working on the story for the better part of a year. The plot is all you think it should be, and you love the characters you’ve created. Finally, you reach the day when you get to type every author’s favorite phrase: The End. You do your little happy-dance around the office and maybe celebrate with the family.
Then you read what you’ve written. Uh-oh. That big twist in Chapter Seventeen wasn’t as well set-up as you wanted it to be. And jeeze-oh-peeze that dialogue seems flat in Chapter Seven. And the spelling errors! Oh, my God! You hunker down and make those changes, plus dozens more. Woo-hoo! You’re done.
Then you read what you’ve written. Damn. Now that you’ve changed Chapters Four, Eight and Eleven, that Chapter Seventeen twist is so obvious that people will see it coming from ten miles away. And your protagonist’s hair color has somehow miraculously changed in Chapter Twenty-Four. Besides, you know what? This whole story might just suck. Maybe treating the story as a mystery is a mistake from the beginning. Maybe it needs to be romantic suspense. Maybe you need to start over from page one.
Maybe it was better before you started diddling with it. Maybe . . . blah, blah, blah.
A friend of mine who is a landscape painter told me once that good artists and great artists are separated by the ability to know when the trees in the painting have exactly the right number of leaves. You can have too few, and you can have too many, and a great artist knows when to quit. A successful writer knows when his story is finished and it’s time to let it go.
I struggle with this on every book I write. Hell, I struggle with it on every one of these blog posts. I’m an obsessive re-writer, but I can’t stand the notion of something being “out there” that is not exactly the way I want it to be. And more times than not, when I look at it one more time, there’s something else I feel compelled to change.
How do you all determine when it’s time to move on? How do you gather the courage to quit?
I’m also a compulsive re-writer. I force myself to quit when it gets to the point where I’m just “tinkering.” When I’m not making any discernible changes to the manuscript and only changing a word here, or a comma there, it’s time to stop.
“How do you all determine when it’s time to move on?” John, the realistic answer is that I quite on the day the manuscript is due to the publisher. But I don’t consider a book to ever be done. If the editor gave me one more month, I’d mess with it one more month.
Here’s a good lesson: Every Sunday, my wife makes me my favorite breakfast–pancakes and bacon. She uses a pre-mixed packet where all she does is add milk, stir and cook. The pancakes were always tasty, but flat. Then one Sunday, she served me pancakes that were thick and fluffy. I asked her what she did different. She said that she noticed on the directions not to over-stir. She tried leaving a few lumps in the batter and the cakes came out perfect.
Moral of the story: If you overwork your book, the original spark of creativity gets diluted and the story becomes flat.
“How do you know when you’re finished?” is the question I have most often asked authors. None of them has given a good answer. I guess at some point you just know.
One thing I do is to hold off writing THE END until I’m really, truly finished. Once I type THE END, I put it aside and don’t look at it again unless requested by an agent or an editor. That’s the only way I can save myself from sucumbing to the urge to “tinker.” (Perfect word choice, Joyce.)
I have not come to the point yet that I can be certain I am finished, but I certainly am done.
Having reached the point of loathing I let my agent take it and let her eyes say if its done or not. And I am afraid to look at it again, lest I be sucked into the manuscript and end up changing some major feature that throws the whole thing out of whack.
I struggle with this myself John and I’m not sure any book is really ‘done’ in my mind – like Joe it’s just done when I have to hand it over!
I think it’s a question we all, published and unpublished, struggle with. It’s also another thing we the unpublished might think we’ll no longer experience when we sell a manuscript. It’s nice to know this isn’t the case.
I do think overworking can cause as much harm as underworking. A good example: in the book I’m currently trying to sell, I originally had too much detail in the first section, but in rewriting I cut too far. Now I’ve had to go back and pad the description a bit to return some flavor. So far I don’t have the instincts to just know when it’s done so I count on my critique group and beta readers, though I know the agent and editor will have plenty of changes down the road.
Me too, and especially on blog posts – even on comments? I love Joe Moore’s pancake analogy!
I keep a fat lady in the spare bedroom to deal with this problem.
She does a great aria.