How in all the various hells can I possibly publish this? · 5:31am Jan 7th, 2017
That feeling you get when you have a story completed, proofread, edited, and generally have pulled together a consensus it's ready to publish, ready to send out into the world to be seen and read by the anonymous masses...
Then you sit down with the doc open in one tab, the web form open in another, and start getting ready to copy it over, chapter by chapter...
As you're reading it you start noticing things, start seeing clumsy bits of grammar that both you and your editors missed, words that seem repeated too many times, a word or phrase that is not quite right for the feeling you're trying to invoke, or your punctuation or voice is clearly entirely wrong and you have to restructure the entire sentence to get it to flow better...
And you suddenly realize that there is no way you could possibly inflict this garbage on the world, no way that you could handle the ideal of anyone else reading the crap sitting in front of you, and it's time to go back and bloody well re-write the entire thing from the ground up because who in their right mind could ever possibly want to read this abomination of mangled prose and tortured imagery.
Or maybe it's just me, I dunno.
I'm starting to get extremely sick of looking at this stupid story.
This happens to every author. Literally everyone with actual skill and a critical eye always has that moment of looking at their stuff and thinking it's trash. We see the faults in our own work more clearly than anyone else. Some of the greatest literary works of all time came to be hated by their own authors later in life because they either grew beyond that old thing, or they were privy to all the worries and insecurities behind every word.
I can say from personal experience that if I didn't have pre-readers, nothing would ever make it out of the editing stage. I'd just keep tweaking forever and ever. Because that's what happens when you just spend all this time in an echo chamber of your own thoughts. Eventually, your inner critic is the only voice you can hear. That's why you need other people. That's why there's stories out there of the loved ones of authors going behind their back to take the manuscript to a publisher because the author can't see past their own insatiable drive to improve.
Also, assuming this is about the story I helped edit, the epistolary format can literally justify all of those little nitpicks about grammar and weird sentence flow. There's a very important rule of writing I think you need to know: All rules about sentence structure go out the window once a character starts talking. First-person narration is so popular because it means you can do things like have people's disorganized thoughts play out in a totally chaotic way, and nobody bats an eye because that's just how Character X is thinking and looking at the world.
I hope this has helped.
4372534
Yeah, I definitely understand that point, it's just so hard to get past it. Especially when the depression kicks in.
I'm reminded of that old saw "No work of art is ever truly finished, only abandoned". I just need to force myself to abandon it. But my brain wants just one more quick run through to fix a few odd bits first...
4372934 A suggested compromise: From the time you see this message, you have twenty-four hours. By the end of this twenty-four hour period, you must stop any edits you are doing and submit the fic. Until that point, you may nitpick your own work to your heart's content.