Re: Revising and When is it good enough?

I'm starting to hate the endless revisions. I'm feeling really frustrated with them. It's a really terrible attitude to take. I know. I know. So I'm trying to give myself a positive outlook in this post. I will try anyway.

Regarding (or Re:) Revisions. Revising. Rewriting. Reworking.

Writing, and rewriting, it can go on and on and on. What drives me to do this to myself? I found this article about rewriting, called Writers on Rewriting . It has a collection of quotes from different writers about the subject, everyone from Earnest Hemingway, E.B. White, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker and many others. It makes me both encouraged and discouraged to read them over.

Seeing Joyce Carol Oates say, "The pleasure is the rewriting." Makes me want to tear my hair out. NO IT IS NOT PLEASURE. IT IS PAINFUL, VERY VERY PAINFUL.

(Then I take a deep breath).

A little farther I find the quote by Gay Talese :"I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work."

Ah ha! That's exactly it. I want to find the "finished work". And I will write and rewrite, just like he said, until I can find it. It's a relief to know I am not alone in my struggle. That other brilliant writers spend so much time searching and struggling until they find satisfaction. Maybe that's when I'll find pleasure, not during the process of rewriting, but afterward when I have a "finished work".

And then further down the pages comes a quote by Bernard Malamud, "I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times--once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say."

ONLY THREE TIMES? I think, phew, that's not very many. I can do three revisions. I can do that. I know what he's talking about. Write it down, then improve upon it, then fix it again, then go back again and fix something else and. ONLY THREE TIMES? What is he talking about? I have to go back and fix things again and again and again...

It never ends.
I sometimes take offense at the word WRITE because when I say it in my head and aloud, it sounds like RIGHT. So I get fixated on writing the right words. I get so hung up in the search I'm afraid I'll lose focus on what makes the story, a story and what makes it beautiful and wonderful and fun to read. Words are just words unless they are put together in way that makes sense and just fits and that's so hard to do.

I suppose I'll just have to keep searching, to keep trying.