When Too Much Polishing Ruins the Story

One of the big questions for beginning writers is just how much one should rewrite a story before sending it out. Some people will tell you to polish everything carefully and only send out your very best so that editors don't come to associate your name with sloppy writing and think you're incompetent. Others (including Robert A. Heinlein, in his famous directives for writers) say that you should never rewrite, save to editorial direction, at most doing one quick pass to correct spelling, grammar and gross errors of continuity (as in, if your character changes name, race, physical appearance or other major characteristics without a good in-story reason) so that you don't spend all your time trying to perfect one masterpiece story and never write anything else, or send anything anywhere.

This is especially true when you've just written something that's near and dear to your heart, and you really, really want to give it the best chance you can get it. Especially when most publications will give you exactly one chance with any given story (and some of them keep submission records in perpetuity -- I once got called out for resending a heavily rewritten story to a market that I'd sent it almost a decade earlier, since I'd forgotten that the market had even existed that long ago and hadn't checked my list of prior submissions thoroughly), you don't want to blow it with a stupid or careless mistake. So there's a temptation to think that if you just buckle down hard enough, you can get it right, irrespective of your skill level.

Which leads to the paradox of actually over-polishing a story to the point that you take all the life out of it and end up with a "recital piece," stiff and mannered with everything just so. Something to be admired for the effort you've put into it, but not really enjoyed.

In the current environment, this problem can be exacerbated by fear of causing inadvertent offense, of using the wrong turn of phrase or the wrong characterization or whatever, and suddenly being showered with condemnations for being racist, sexist, ableist, or whatever. So you go through and scrub it of everything that might cause offense, and in the process produce something so bland that pablum is tasty in comparison. It has no spirit because it doesn't take any risks.

Unfortunately, it's often a problem that only experience can cure -- experience that has to be won through writing lots of different stories, not endlessly polishing one's first story in hopes of getting it Just Right. And that means that a lot of stories may well be written only to bounce around until they run out of possible markets, and then vanish into a trunk to stay there forever, or until your family decides it's time to clean out the trash. Not what you want to hear about stories that have meant a great deal to you as you wrote them, full of enthusiasm for the ideas but not yet ready to execute them with the facility to tell an enjoyable story.