When Too Much Polishing Ruins a Story -- a Blast from the Past

[starshipcat]

I'm busy with Hall of Heroes Comic Con right now, and what little writing time I have is going to getting everything done for my Kickstarter backers. However, I happened across an old post from another blog I used to run that's still relevant. In fact, it is even more relevant as more and more authors go indie and need to decide whether it's time

Comments

[sartorias]

I think that that advice has done a tremendous amount of damage. There are few writers whose voices, or command of plot and characterization, show best in sending what amounts to rough drafts out. My sense of this was confirmed when I learned of first readers in NY or magazine editors who only had to see certain names to turn around and stuff the story back in the envelope after scanning at most a paragraph or two. A writer can get a rep for flooding markets with half-baked work. If rejections come regularly really really fast, that can be a sign of this pattern

[starshipcat]

That's the problem with one-size-fits-all advice - the person for whom it's absolutely wrong is apt to double down and do it wrong even harder.

Editors are apt to think in terms of people who need to back off on how quick they are to let stuff out in the wild because they see so much from those people, and never see the procrastinators and perfectionists until they've polished right through the finish and ruined the piece, if they ever do at all.

[sartorias]

True, that!