Rewrite the Whole Darned Thing?

The time to put the brakes on is now. Yes, it can always be better, but if you put your need for perfection—which, let's face it, we can't achieve—in the driver's seat, you'll never get past that 40,000 words. Get the story down, THEN go back and revise to the best of your ability. Then stop and move on.

You'll never find the 'best' way to express yourself. You simply have to find a way that's good enough. Seriously, that's all you need – good enough. Otherwise you'll get caught in the dreaded loop of perfectionism.

So I finished my first draft early in the year (came in at ~85k words). I put it aside for a few months. Then I reread it, realized it was crap, and redid pretty much the whole thing (I'm 70,000 words into the rewrite now-- been at it since late October).

But I learned a ton from the first time around, and being able to say I finished the draft-- even if it wasn't that good and ended up needing to be redone, was a huge morale boost for me as a writer. I feel like a lot of people set out to "write a book" and get half way through it before getting stuck in an editing loop.

Write your book! Then edit it!

I don't like re-writes and only do them because it's absolutely nessesary, so I'm coming at this from the other side from where you are. I've heard about famous writers who have produced amazing works by editing them over and over for years. It's the perfectionist versus, well, whatever the opposite is. I'm jealous that you can do it, but I have tremendous sympathy that you feel you need to re-write over and over. I think it's a battle with yourself after a certain point, and not about fixing the work anymore. I've fought with myself plenty and I know how hard that battle can be. After a certain point, just publish it. I know thats incredibly hard to do but at some point, no matter how bad you think it is, finish it. Publish. Move on. I mean, be logical about it, but give yourself a break and allow it to be done.

I did some acting for a movie 10 years ago and the director just keeps tinkering with the movie. He still hasn't released it yet. It's going to be a B rated movie no matter what but I feel like he is determined that if he tinkers with it enough something magical will appear. He hasn't done any more filming that I know about and I feel like his career stopped when he started that film. I don't know if this rant helps or not. Some of the greatest works have come out of a long period of editing. Lord of the Rings took 10 years. So perhaps 10 years is reasonable to brew a book. (Yet another reason not to tie your book to a date too hard.) But it has to be finished at some point.

Good luck with yours,

- Mark Charke