There’s a range of writing types, from people who hate revising and who want to write it down and be done with it, to people who can’t let go of anything and who keep changing it. The trick is to find a balance point that works for you.
Nothing is ever perfect the first time through the computer. Writers who are down at the “hate revising” end of the scale need to recognize that polishing/revising will improve their stuff, even if they hate revising, so it’s a good idea to make oneself do at least one round, regardless. But nothing will ever be perfect, no matter how many times the words get processed. Writers who are up at the far end of the scale, the ones who’ve done seventeen rounds of polishing and who still aren’t satisfied, need to ease up and let go, and move on to the next project.
There are a lot of reasons why some people over-revise. Some of them are perfectionists, under the illusion that there is one clear “best” way to tell their story and struggling to get to it (there isn’t a “best” way; there are different ways that often end up being different stories, and there are some techniques that are more effective for getting certain effects than other techniques, but it depends on what one is trying to do, not on some objective outside standard of what “best” is). Some of them are, deep down in their hearts, afraid of the inevitable rejections, and as long as they keep revising, they’ll never have to deal with them. Some of them have an Internal Editor that is much more highly trained than their Internal Writer — that is, they can analyze a piece of work and find all the problematic areas, but they aren’t as good at writing as they are at editing, so they have all sorts of trouble fixing what they see.
And some don’t have any perspective on the progress that they’re making. They expect everything they write — everything they have already written — to be just as good as the best thing they’re capable of writing now.
But writing is a skill that gets better with practice. Especially when one is just starting off, one tends to get better really rapidly. Every time one finishes a story, one is a better, more skilled writer than one was when one started writing it. Some people don’t realize this, so when they get to the end of a story and look back at the beginning and see that it’s not as good as they now know they’re capable of, they think they’re failing somewhere along the way. (This is especially true of writers who do longer works — a novel is a lot of practice, and the improvement tends to be really noticeable.) If they go back and look at previously-written stories, they sometimes get really upset by how “bad” their writing is…when they ought to be really pleased by how much they’ve learned and how much better they’ve gotten.
And there are some writers who just don’t ever, ever like their finished work. It is very hard to judge your own stuff with any kind of objectivity; sometimes, the parts that you thought were just wonderful, that you were really proud of, are the ones where the editor says “This section is really slow and unnecessary; cut it and it’ll make the book stronger,” or the bits you thought were a little stupid are the ones that, after the book comes out, everybody keeps telling you are hilariously funny.
All any writer can ever do is take the best crack at it that they can, and then let it go and let other people decide, while the writer moves on to the next thing. What constitutes your “best crack at it,” and when you decide to move on, are things that each writer has to decide for him/herself.
I think I fall into the over-edit category, as I’ve been working on the same project for, oh golly, ten-ish years now (not straight through. on and off through school). This month, I’m trying NaNoWriMo, which I’m hoping will force the words out and the internal editor to take a back seat.
My question: So pretend you’ve spent so much time on something that you’ve got gobs and gobs of backstory and little trivial details, like the MC is terminally left handed or her brother has to organize his pens in a very specific way or their uncle won the very first US Open. These things have nothing to do with the plot but add humanizing quirks to the characters that would make them so much more interesting in real life. How do you find the balance of details without hitting overload?
accio_aqualung – Are you revising as you write, or do you have a full draft that you’re going over and over? Because if you’ve been working for ten years, and you only have a third or a half of a book, then either you are normally a very, very slow writer, or you are only working when you feel like it (and you don’t feel like it very often), or you are spending way too much time going over and over your old stuff and not producing new words. If it’s the last one, NaNoWriMo may very well help; it can at least teach you that you CAN write without having to second-guess every word or revise everything to a high gloss polish before you move on.
For everyday once November is over, if over-revising really is the problem, I suggest trying the thing where you simply refuse to allow yourself to do ANY revisions until you have a complete first draft. If it doesn’t work, then you can try various other things to find a balance between the two extremes (constant revision while trying to move forward vs. no revising allowed until it’s finished).
I think I’m going to use the rest of your question for another blog post because I can get really long when I start talking about stuff like that…
Hooray I inspired a blog post!
I’ve finished a few drafts of this thing, which began as some sort of half-baked pseudo-fanfiction mesh way back in 7th grade. I worked on it on and off through high school and college, where 25 page papers on the roots of american slavery really killed the creativity, so I would stay involved by creating backstory, like geneologies and stuff. I’m also deeply emotionally attached because it got me through high school. Some kids start cutting themselves to deal with problems; I wrote. Only in the past year or so have I really beaten into Real Novel shape and taken out the parts where I’m figuring out life issues. Now, er, I don’t really have an excuse besides “I’m out of ideas,” to which you would reply, “just write through the block.” To which my response would most likely be a petulant whine and, “But its HARD!”
accio_aqualung – Who ever said writing was going to be easy? 🙂
But “I’m out of ideas” is something you can deal with in a lot of ways besides “write through the block.” In fact, brainstorming and plot-noodling are probably much more efficient ways of handling that particular problem, because by the time you’re that far into a book or story, you don’t exactly need new ideas – you’re building on what you’ve already said and the things that have already happened.
And if you already have a complete draft, and you are “out of ideas” – is the problem perhaps that it’s actually DONE? That it’s time to move on to something completely NEW, and start submitting the one that’s finished?
Any time I’m tempted to over-edit, I remember the book Dorothea Dreams by Suzie McKee Charnas about an artist who gets more or less trapped into her own work by her perfectionism and I let go of the book at “good enough”.