denysfisher.com

This is a question that comes up again and again with my book about dad, which I have been working on over the last six years (although not continuously for all of that period).

Currently I’m on my tenth draft (…..or it might be more than ten – I have rather lost count now!) and while the book is essentially complete, it’s still hard to resist tinkering with it. Often this takes the form of working in some new snippet of information that has come to light, but I also find myself re-editing passages that I have worked on many, many times before.

I am currently waiting to receive various permissions for the intellectual property that I use in the book, so I am not in a position to just “whack it up on Amazon” even if I wanted to. Having to wait around like this makes me start picking over the document once again – and hopefully improve it.

At some point though, I will have to shut down the business of making any more changes and just go with what I’ve got. It seems to me now that the process of writing a book could potentially be endless; there’s always another minor lead that one could follow that might produce a few crumbs of additional information – but it’s definitely become a case of diminishing returns.

Perhaps I need to bear in mind the immortal words of Lenoardo Da Vinci on this subject: