Good Enough?

I don’t often write about the process of writing in my weekly blogs. I think about it though, and recently a particular question has been gnawing at me. For the past month, I have been editing material I’d written over a year ago, and I find myself asking the same question over and over again. It might be useful to put the question in writing.

It is this: when my writing is not as good as it could be, but maybe as good as I can make it, how do I know when to stop? Stated another way, is there a point where I have to admit to myself that a particular piece of writing, while obviously imperfect, is as good as it is going to get?

I enjoy editing, and I especially enjoy editing when I haven’t looked at a piece for a while. When sufficient time has passed, I can review my own prose without feeling personally attached to it. Important content written poorly is easy to identify and sometimes easy to fix. Irrelevant content, even if written well, is deleted without much hesitation. I can, however, take this form of editing too far. If I revise a manuscript a half dozen times and wait up to a year between revisions, five years can pass before I submit anything for publication. When I worked at universities and felt constant pressure to publish a few articles every year, self-administered deadlines took care of this problem. Now that I am retired, I sit on material too long. Hence the question, when is good enough good enough?

At times I over-edit. I can revise a piece until I suck the life out of it. My writing voice is naturally flawed (e.g., limited vocabulary, an unsophisticated vernacular), but those flaws give my writing its character. When I realize that I have gone too far with my revisions, I am grateful that my word processing program lets me retrieve previous versions of whatever I’ve written. My best writing is seldom the last draft. 

I read random chapters of Walden at least once a year. It is the closest thing I have to a manual for life. In Walden, Thoreau wrote that perfection has no timeline. He also wrote that he left the woods because he had other lives to live. In terms of helping me figure out when it is time to move on from a particular piece of writing, Walden is not useful.