The pursuit of perfection can be endless and extremely frustrating. I try to work toward "as good as it's going to get."

I tend to write a book over the course of two to three months, then set it aside. Some months later, once my initial enthusiasm has died off, I pick it up again and begin to edit. At this point it's not as painful to cut or rewrite things as it would've been if I'd just written them the night or the week previous. There's some degree of detachment that comes with time.

On the first pass, I change wording, rewrite paragraphs, chapters, and so on, until I feel like I've arrived at a clearer expression of what I set out to say. This always involves a cost-value debate, as in "If I change this then I need to change that and rewrite that other thing, which will affect these other things. Will the net result be positive?" I decide whether a revision is worth the effort it will require before pursuing it. If the revision will alter my book significantly but make it better overall, then I go with it. If the revision will create an equally-good (or worse) but substantially different story, I tend to ignore it. The result would not be the novel that I set out to write.

On the second pass, there's less work to be done. The story has held together fairly close to its original shape, or taken on a new form that I prefer. Now I start getting into the petty details. Changing sentences, rewriting paragraphs, but leaving the chapters, the plot, the overall structure as it is.

On the third pass, I find myself picking at specific words, rewriting sentences, loath to rewrite an entire paragraph (but still doing so.) I'm trying to smooth things over - tame things down where they got too silly, make the boring parts more interesting.

On the fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on passes, I find myself reading more than editing. I change a word here and there. I start questioning my changes. "Does this make any real difference?"

Eventually I read through the thing without making a single change. It's "done".

But it's not perfect.

I could insert such-and-such a paragraph in chapter two to more deeply explore this-and-that, but it would interrupt the flow of the narrative. Is that worthwhile? Evidently I've read through this thing ten times and decided that no, it's not.

And so on.

In the end, what I come out with is not perfect. I've failed to explore certain concepts, failed to look at the story from certain angles - but I've decided that it's better (for the sake of pacing or whatever) to go this route. Any significant changes that I make now will turn the book into something different: not the story that it currently tells, but another one with its own set of compromises.

Basically, I settle on "as good as it's going to get" when I get as close as I can to saying what I set out to say in the first place while leaving the least of the message behind. If that makes sense.

That said, I've written somewhere around eight novels and never made any real effort to get any of them published. They're all shit, except for the last one that I wrote. That one has potential ... but I'm not done editing it yet.

:D