When does it end?

I am referring to a story. I find myself reading and editing my stories several times before submitting them for posting. I am sure this is common among authors. However, I find myself reviewing my already posted stories and revising them slightly; not enough to be considered a new story or re posting the story just little bits added here and there. Is this common among other authors?

Sadly yes, only yesterday I re-read a very old story of mine and found a typo.

One does need to have an attitude of making stories 'good enough', not perfect. Oftentimes I'll change some phrase in the perpetual editing process back to what it was the time before last, not realising till later that that's what I'd done. If this is the case then it probably doesn't matter much which version was used.

Having said that there's a piece of poetry of mine on this site which has got a fairly egregious failure of metre which would have been so easy to fix had I spotted it or had I left it for long enough before returning to it.

I also tend to revise probably far more than is therapeutic. I’ve read that a number of popular fiction writers will finish a novel, then leave it alone for months before rereading and editing again. That might just be the artists in us, hoping to perfect something inherently imperfect. Now, to avoid analysis paralysis, I read a completed story, then run it through a text to speech program to hear it in a different voice. I continue this process until I can get all the way through without an edit. I then submit it to flopsy as quick as I can before I can reconsider. That’s not to say that I don’t cringe a little when, like opb, I read it in the library and find a hidden typo or misspelling. Danged OCD anyway.

I reread and rewrite several times and use a system based not on times but degree of changes each rewrite. If I continue to change even small things I will keep adding more planned rereads. Only after I reread something at least twice without making any changes at all, do I feel ready to send it in.......and even then, as others have said, at some later point I'll have one of those "DAMN!" moments where I see I should have changed something else.

But this is the artistic process for all the arts. I paint and draw and have the same process for those things too.

I have no system beyond re-reading things up to 3 or 4 times, depending. If it's a long novel, every chapter gets edited at least once, and then again on a final read-through.

But there's also the matter of being 'in the groove' or 'on a roll' - i.e. inspired. Editing when lacking energy is okay for spytting topos, but for adding zest and precision to the prose I need to feel zippy and imaginative. In short, it's a mood thing. I end up having to edit most when the first draft lacked inspiration. Edit - as maybe you write - when the Muse is with you.

I've never studied a writing course, but I've read (and studied and taught) a LOT of novels in my 69 years, and three tips have stayed with me, one of them from the great Janine: be sparing with adverbs and the present continuous tense, and avoid hedging (a tendency I have, sort of).

P.S. And, for dialogue, use contractions/elisions - it's how people speak!

I have to let the story "age out of my mind", often not looking at it for months, or I will mentally correct minor typos. A word was left out? My mind will fill it in. Shifting tenses in the middle of a sentence? My mind will shift things until the tenses agree. Things such as:
Last Tuesday, Karen arrive home and found a belt laid out on her bed.

Like others, I read and re-read my work pre-publication until I am making no more corrections. Not only the whole story, once written, but earlier sections whilst still writing.

To avoid disrupting the reading, I do not make corrections as I go. Instead, I highlight bits that I notice need attention and return to them later, when I do a job lot of revisions.

I rarely read the published versions, except to put a marker on the "Recently Viewed" list, to tell me which viewings I have noted and which not. Usually I re-read my stories in my library of submitted works, and I continue to edit/improve them there. Again, like others, I am sometimes embarrassed to discover errors that should, but were not, corrected before submission for publication. As a consequence there are generally slight differences between a published story and my master copy.

Why do I do that? Well in part it is the pursuit of "perfection", so for its own sake. In part it is so that in the extremely unlikely event of a book publisher contacting me, hoping to publish an anthology of my work, I have the best possible versions for that purpose!

Geoffrey Stirling.

TheEnglishMaster said:

I've never studied a writing course, but I've read (and studied and taught) a LOT of novels in my 69 years, and three tips have stayed with me, one of them from the great Janine: be sparing with adverbs and the present continuous tense, and avoid hedging (a tendency I have, sort of).


Good tips, all, but I'm not familiar with hedging. Would you kindly elaborate EM?

Is "a tendency I have, sort of" a fine example of "hedging"?

The short answer is that it never ends, not even after the stories are published. I sometimes reread my old stories, either because I just feel like it or because a comment makes it necessary to look up a passage, and I'm often struck by how emotional it is. Sometimes I hate what I read and want to change the whole story, and at other times I'm quite satisfied with myself. The strange thing is that this can happen on two consecutive readings of the same story.

Like Geoffrey I have a master file where I keep copies of all my stories, and when I find misprints or other mistakes, I correct them there, but my vascillations make me reluctant to make any major literary revisions. The only consistent thing I can find is cringing with embarrassment over elaborate formulations that I remember being particularly pleased with when I was writing the story.