Improper Poll: The Point of No Returning

I’ve spent much of the weekend revising a dog story with a toasty-warm cat curled up in my lap. The cat thing loses a great deal of its charm when the outside temperatures have long surpassed warm toast and are hovering much closer to sizzling bacon grease as they've been in the past few days. Still, I only had the heart to move that cuddly kitty a few times. He certainly didn’t take the hint when I fanned us with exuberance. Anyway. All this revising reminded me of something.

Years ago, I was talking to an artist, and she told me the hardest thing for her was knowing when she was done with a painting. I understood what she meant. For me, writing is even worse. When I write, I must reach The Point of No Returning before I submit something, or it’s torture. And by Point of No Returning, I don’t mean the point where it’s impossible to turn back. I have to get to a point where I’ve returned to the story so many times, I can’t think of a single thing left to do to it and am therefore no longer compelled to keep returning.

Maybe it’s a sickness, but I return again and again because I keep finding misplaced modifiers, poor word choices, trite phrasing and even missing words. How could I not have noticed these things the first, second, and twelfth times I read the piece? I think it’s because writing is always an interplay between emotion and logic, between what we want to say and how we want to say it. If spoken language is sound that is symbolic of our thoughts, then writing is physical symbols that represent the audible ones. In other words, each written word is a symbol of a symbol. That’s tricky stuff. For me, it’s too easy to go deaf to the sound of my own writing voice, I think because I have to keep one part of my brain quiet while the other does its thing, because the two don’t always play well together. Is it just me? Am I making excuses? Maybe. I only know that I constantly must rap on the knuckles of the part of my brain that has to remember writing rules while shoving another part out the window to go romp in the rule-breaking land of creativity. It’s an ongoing war in which the sides continuously shush each other.

The worst thing is I’ve learned from experience is that if I submit something too soon, and if it still manages to get accepted, I will quite possibly hate it for all eternity if it didn’t reach the Point of No Returning. Or if I later think of a better way to have made a point.

Twice now, I ‘ve done something that is probably taboo in the writing world. When an editor has sent me edits, I’ve asked if I could add a couple more. They were tiny—nothing that would change a word count—but I felt if I didn’t do them, I couldn’t be at ease with the piece. Fortunately both times the editors were gracious about it.

Am I a hopeless neurotic? Do you revise compulsively? And when do you know a piece is finished?

I’d also like to welcome a relatively new blog follower, Theresa Sanders. Theresa is a local writer and a dear friend who inspires me as both because she writes as she lives, with her own brand of gentle, yet sophisticated, grace. Thank you for joining, Teri!