Lose your obsession with continual polishing

You just drafted Chapter 2. You shared it with your developmental editor, who suggested a bunch of changes. What do you do next?

1. Go back to Chapter 1 and revise it based on what you learned from the Chapter 2 edits.
2. Make all the recommended changes in Chapter 2 and send it back to the editor.
3. Start work on Chapter 3.

Disciplined writers start work on Chapter 3. Undisciplined writers repeatedly revise work already written — a habit of continual polishing.

That’s a habit I want you to break.

Continual polishing is the opposite of progress

It is human nature to want to fix known problems. That’s why you want to revise the chapter as soon as you receive the edits.

Your desire to continue fixing the chapter you wrote is based on an illusion. You think you can perfect it. You can’t.

Here are a few reasons why you should resist that urge:

• Creating new work is hard. Addressing comments is easy. Don’t put off the hard work, you’ll just reduce the amount of time you have to do it.
• Continual revision is endless. You’ll never be done. Every time you see a problem you’ll get sucked into fixing it. Perfecting one chapter isn’t possible, but it is seductive. When, eventually, the grim reaper shows up, your last words will be, “Okay, but just let me make the last few edits on Chapter 2.”
• All of your polishing will become obsolete. As you work on future chapters, you will develop new insights about the manuscript. The only way to develop those insights is to work on those new chapters. Those insights will cause you to rethink your approach in Chapter 2, so all that polishing you did will be wasted.
• You’re using up your objectivity. Each time you revise a chapter, you become more familiar with it. You lose perspective. If you use that up early in the manuscript creation process, it won’t be there when you need it on the final draft of the whole book. You’ll look at Chapter 2 and think “Is this any good? I have no idea any more.” And that’s dangerous.

Leaving that chapter and its comments takes maturity, I know. It’s hard.

I probably shouldn’t do this, but here are some reasonable reasons to revise Chapter 2 instead of moving on:

• You had an insight that applies to the whole book and you want to see how it works. So apply it to Chapter 2 and see what you think. After you’ve indulged yourself in that, leave it alone.
• You realized you’re going to have to rewrite a big chunk of it. For example, the hero of your opening case study just got sentenced to a decade in prison for fraud, so you can’t use that story any more. Rather than leave it in a known state of disaster, you need to fix it to the point where you don’t have to worry about it any more.
• You need to share it with someone important. A prestigious reviewer wants to look at it, or you need to insert it into your book proposal as a sample chapter. These are reasonable justifications for polishing.

These are excuses. If there is an alternative, try to avoid them.

The cost of continual polishing

Who pays for continual polishing?

You do.

You pay in lost time when you could be creating instead of polishing.

You pay every time you ask your editor to look at a chapter again, and they charge you for it.

You pay in the doubt that creeps in when you know something isn’t done, and can’t be done, but you work on it anyway.

Continual polishing seems easy now, but is expensive later. Outgrow it.