The wise Tim Gunn
From an interview with Tim Gunn:Explain the rationale behind your trademark phrase from “Project Runway”: “Make it work!”
In teaching, I've found that students are often more inclined to start over when they encounter a problem than to work through the problem, to diagnose it, and offer up a prescription for how to fix it. And I find that that's a very bad learning strategy. So to take something that has a problem and to work through the problem and have the project succeed, that's what's behind “make it work.”
It's advice fledging writers should take as well. Yes, there are diminishing returns in tweaking something endlessly, and if all you do is fiddle with where the commas should go, and debate whether you should you use "raced" or "dashed", then yes, you're just trying to rub shiny on it.
But you will learn faster if you take a crap story and figure out why it's crap and try to fix it, than you will if you just keep starting new stories and never deconstruct them.