I just finished the first draft of my first ever short story
partyguy
around 6,000 words. I know it helps some people make a gap between writing the story and editing. I just wondering how long do you wait.
Thanks!
EDIT: Also how long do you wait until you start a new story?
If it's a short story, and you're at the start of your journey, this means two things:
1) in itself the short story doesn't need more than a few days off. What will help is converting the document to pdf, epub, mobi, and reading it from different screens. Or at least play around with the fonts in the doc, like if you're using times new roman, or courier, or georgia, shift to the other two and read it that way. All this will really help fool the brain into reading it with fresh eyes.
2) if we imagine writing (or playing the guitar or what have you) as a steep hill (learning curve), with a plateu at the end--the closer you are to the plateu, the less abrupt the changes in skill levels will be, but the closer you are to the start--the more impressive the jumps in skill levels and understanding. In this sense, stories which you write now, will look adorable and in need of heavy rewrites when you're closer to the plateu, while stories written later will in hindsight need a few sentences fiddled with at most.
Right now, at the start of the journey, your skills, knowledge, approach, and style, will change a lot and fast. So if you wait too long to edit your early stuff, you can get caught in a 'growth edit loop', especially with longer works--by the time you're editing it for real--you've changed so much you need to change the whole text, and by the time you've done that, you've changed again so you need to change the text again, and so on.
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Furthermore, some writers at the start of their writing journey are also at the start of their life journey--i.e. are still school kids or young adults. And life is its own curve with its own slowing down and plateau after the brain stops growing around the mid-twenties. So whatever happens between say puberty and the mid-twenties is colored by this 'speeded up learning time of life'. Later, while learning and adapting may slow down, experience nevertheless continues accumulating--in realms such as social interaction, work, longterm relationships. Stuff written after decades of life experience, may be quite different from the stuff written before the decades of life experience, even if the basic writing skills have remained the same on the level of structure and prose. And, obviously, stuff written at an age when a year feels like a decade, can have a vastly different vibe from stuff written when a decade feels like a year.
While the person at 50 or 60 is not infrequantly basically the same one as at 30, only hopefully more experienced and wiser and better at life-management and at achieving goals, the time before that can be a whirlwind of constant change and growth and...chaos...before some form of stabilization appears. So if one is for example at the larva stage of both writing and human growth, then doing what needs to be done and moving on, as opposed to lingering, starts sounding even more appropriate.
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So back to the original question--better to be done reasonably fast, IMO, so that certain works simply remain momuments to certain periods in your growth as a writer, and not get bogged down in constantly trying to upgrade and update one thing over and over, to reflect your changing abilities and tastes. And possibly age. Keep this in mind when embarking on longer projects any time soon. (Unless one goes the Rothfuss way who I think started his fantasy saga still with milk formula around his mouth and kept fiddling with it until finally finishing it as a grown man)
Thus I recommend two ways of doing this: either wait only for a few days and then look at the story through different format goggles and fix it and that's that, or put it away until New Year and keep writing, and once January 2019 is here--start editing all the stuff you've written until then. Because it's very likely that, being at the very start of the writing learning curve, by early 2019 you'll have developed quite a lot and be more capable than now to do editing justice to your current drafts. To the extent of the difference between 'almost presentable' and 'fairly publishable'.
I myself would do both
Fix it now, and then fix it again come 2019, and in between--write another pile of stuff--with a view for it to also be 'upgraded' in 2019.
Thus entering the new year at a run.
