How do I know when something I have written is good enough?

Edit. Revise. Rewrite. Repeat.

Until the end of time? Possibly. It is difficult to know when something is "done." In a way, it never is. If you love to write, if you write regularly, then you are always improving your skill. What you write tomorrow will be better than what you wrote yesterday.

But when is it DONE?

If you want to get published then at some point, you have to print it off, stick a stamp on it, and send it out into the cold, lonely world. When do you do that?

Think about how you feel when you first get an idea for a story. Isn't it exciting? You can't wait to get words down on the page, however clunky! Maybe you outline, maybe you don't (there is no one right way to write), but you live the story as you write it that first time. It has umph. It has passion. It has sparkle.

But it also has a lot of errors. Plus, maybe when you wrote that last scene you realized that Jake had to have gotten Nancy pregnant in chapter 2 or this ending will never work. Oh, and really, you didn't need Mike at all. He seemed like a great character in the beginning but he turned out to be totally useless.

There are millions of these. Some big, some small, but all amount to ways that next time, you can write it better. Maybe you thought of them on your own, maybe you had a critique group help you. Either way, you know in your heart of hearts that you need to rewrite the story. Because it can be better. Because you have learned more about being a writer.

Each time you write the same story, it becomes more and more technically correct, incorporates more and more good writing skills that you have picked up along the way, and those plot holes get smoother and smoother. BUT each time you rewrite, the sparkle diminishes.

Think of it like a supply and demand chart. The point where the supply and demand lines meet is the optimal number of widgets to make at the optimal price.

It's the same here -- the optimal story is at the point where the sparkle and technical lines intersect. If you keep writing after that, you may get a more technically correct story but you will lose in passion and purpose.

Simple, huh? :=)

No, it's never simple. Life is hardly ever simple. Heck, I can complicate this idea for you even further by mentioning that you can regain sparkle by having more time elapse -- something you'd never want to write again today may come back to life in ten years or twenty years or thirty years.

Maybe you're willing to wait. Or maybe it's just better to do the best you can, send your little manuscript out into the world, and let it find its way. Meanwhile, writers improve by writing new things, not by writing the same thing over and over again until they can't see words in the ink.

Happy writing.