Any smart writer knows, has heard and read it all before–make sure your manuscript is perfect (or damn close to it) before it goes in front of an agent or editor. But as I revise my new novel (SP), I have to wonder when revising stops making a book better and starts making it worse. As I revise SP I find myself taking out certain sentences, adding others–and each plays a part in changing the overall tone and theme of the story. I don’t want to change the story at all…so why do I keep trying?

I think about my book Only the Lucky, the one I wrote and rewrote for two years before finally telling my former agent that I just couldn’t do it anymore. She was sure there was still a magic formula out there that I just hadn’t discovered to make it absolutely perfect and would settle for no less. But as I tore it apart and put it back together again, again and again and again, at some point I couldn’t even remember what the story was supposed to be about–and didn’t really know what it should be about. There are hundreds of drafts of Only the Lucky now saved in my computer–and each is slightly different. That’s insanity. That’s obsession. And when you can no longer discern which is the right/best copy as the writer, then you’ve really got a problem. You’ve gotten lost in your own trip.

I’m not sure there really is a “perfect” when writing and submitting a book. What some agents and editors want will always be different from what others want. But what about the nagging thought that the old beginning may have been better than the new one? Or the nagging thought that I should move this one scene closer to the beginning–but can’t, because then I’d have to rewrite the entire book? I remember once being told to move a scene from Only the Lucky up to the front of the book–but couldn’t feasibly figure out a way to do it without changing the entire landscape of the story. And the question always was, would it have been “perfect” had I done that–or so different that it would have just been a different book, and one that wasn’t necessarily better?

After being turned down by two agents who read the first three chapters of SP and chose not to read on, I decided to make some alterations to the beginning. Now I think it’s good, better, pretty damn close to being perfect. But the truth is, there will still be those agents who read the new version and choose not to read on. 

As a reader I know how crucial the beginning of a book is. I own a lot of books that I started reading years ago and never finished because I just couldn’t get into them. But somewhere out there was an agent, and an editor, who thought the beginning was just as it should be–and a whole audience of readers who thought the same.

I am an obsessive writer, a perfectionist, and I think that’s a good thing. But it becomes a bad thing when I spend all my time feeling stressed out and wanting to punish myself with a hundred more revisions because it seems that a book still isn’t good enough. At some point it has to be, doesn’t it?