During a conversation with a fellow author yesterday, the subject of tinkering came up. Both of us, it became clear, will read and re-read our draft chapters and stories and, as is normal, we will spot something. It can be prose, sentence construction, plot discrepancies…almost anything.
In my own case, knowing that people were reading story samples resulted in me going back and re-reading the samples, only to find…yep, you guessed it, stuff that I thought needed fixing. So I tinkered.
The question is: what does one do about this tendency?
I am a great believer in a saying (attributed to Leonardo da Vinci) that works of art are never completed, they are abandoned. At some point, an artist will examine one of their creations, and internally, emotionally and practically, will say “this is done”. At that point, if they publish or reveal works to a wider audience, the artwork will be sent out into the world. The artist has already moved on.
Very few writers ever go back and revise a work of fiction after its initial publication. The best example I can think of is John Fowles, who revised The Magus 20 years after its initial publication, on the grounds that he was never happy with the original ending, but had no time to revise it, since his publishers suddenly wanted to publish the book after the success of his previous books, so it was published in a form that he was not entirely happy with. (Personally, I still prefer the original ending, but that is just me).
Any Work In Progress can be tinkered with, and will be tinkered with. But only up to a point. As a music fan, I have become wearily used to listening to music that, you very quickly realize, was tinkered with too much, either to make it better, or to somehow make it sound better. The end result usually screams “we spent too much time on this”. In the worst case, it sounds as though all of the interest and inspiration that went into initially composing and playing the music has been beaten out of it in the post-recording process, and there is little of any interest left.
It is like the difference between a manicured, immaculate garden, and one that is less manicured. Most impeccably manicured gardens are unnatural and boring to me, compared to more natural less ordered gardens. The natural world is not regimented, with everything always growing in neat rows. Ditto the written word. Perfection is neither necessary nor desirable.
I do tinker with prose, especially when I determine that the fundamental messages of a chapter are not being communicated. I am also getting used to the idea of actually axing chapters if they add nothing to the narrative or story arc. I expect to do this with Books of Loukas. I have a working draft of book 1 that is 92,000 words in length, and I expect to identify and remove some guff in the editing process.
However, at some point, with editing and tinkering, you say Enough Is Enough. Belem Knight issued a story, Bad Girl Christmas, late last year. That is done, dusted, in the rear view mirror. Nothing will be changed in that novelette, even though, when Belem and I re-read it, we know that there is a lot that could be improved.