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laconicflow t1_iwh3oah wrote

How do you know when to stop messing with a sentence or a paragraph to make it better? this can be done endlessly, after all.

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franhawthorne OP t1_iwifgyq wrote

Yup -- and I may be the wrong person to ask. My novels go through 12 to 18 revisions. (Truly.) In part, that's because I physically FEEL a badly worded phrase; I will search and rewrite and twist a sentence around to avoid having two sentences within a page use the same adverb, for instance. So how do I know when to stop? When I can't stand reading the ms. any more. When a teacher, agent or editor says it's good. When I've reached the deadline when the galleys are due...

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