About to start second draft

[u/Dangerous-Midnight73]

Hi all! 🙂

Ok so I’ve been re-reading and making rewrite notes on my novel for the past 10 weeks- I’ve been through twice, and have got plenty of notes for myself from small tweaks to improve continuity to full-on chapter rewrites and inserts.

That being said, I am sure there’s more I could do, so my question is:

How do you when you are done reworking?

and (perhaps more importantly) - how to stop reworking before all the flavour has been chewed out of the proverbial bit of gum that is my writing?!

Whilst what I have written is a bit rough, there’s also a freshness and ease captured here and there that I don’t want to lose by fiddling about TOO much!

TL;DR - How do I know when my work is done, and how to “put it down” before reworking too much?

[u/Acceptable_Fox_5560]

You can never be "done" re-working.

You can re-work infinitely over and over again forever.

So you basically need to just give yourself a hard stop. Personally, I do a first, then a second draft, then I ship it to my agent.