Well, how much do you revise before you consider a piece finished? Best—@sandraslad
Oh, gosh. Infinitely? Unto the ends of the earth? Until you’re dead?
And then you can be like Monte Python’s plague victims: “‘Not dead yet!”
“Yes, you are.”
I’ve been asked this before, and the straight-forward answer is, “You’re done when your editor says you’re done.”
So if you’ve written a beautiful story and it’s been accepted by the editor of a literary magazine, you’re done.
However, for you poor lambs wandering the blizzard without an editor (either literary or otherwise), I’ve got a whole piece on this, Chapter 28: “Gaining Distance With Time With Truman Capote,” in The Art & Craft of Fiction.
The short version of that chapter is: put it away. For a long time. Go work on other stuff. You know how the Japanese use shaved ginger to cleanse their palettes between bites of sushi? Cleanse your palette.
When you come back, come back with an outline based on what you intended to say, how you intended to say it, and where you intended to kick your reader when you were done saying it. On this read-through, the line-editing will jump out at you. Go ahead. Mark it all up.
Then you can do a second read-through taking notes on how well your story fits your outline. Mark it all up based on that information, too.
And then you can start revising. Yet again.
And then you can start the whole cycle over again one more time.
I kept this up on one novel for fourteen years and never stopped finding important things to fix. Katherine Anne Porter kept it up on Ship of Fools for twenty-nine.
How long can you keep it up?
Writing is only the first step of creating a polished manuscript. The vast bulk of your work will be in revision. This is why I have a job.
And yes, before you ask, Chapter 32 is called simply, “Despair.”