“It ain’t over till it’s over”

When is it over?

That famous philosopher, Yogi Berra said “It ain’t over till it’s over” among other things he said that will go down in history.  Which brings up a point for us as writers.  When is it over?  When have you written enough?  When have you edited enough?  When have you had friends, family and the random person from your writing group give it enough reads?  Is it ready to be sent out with your name on it?  Is it as good as you can make it?

First things first.  It’ll never be right.  You can do all the things mentioned above till the cows come home and chances are you can still find ways to improve it.  The problem is you probably can’t find those ways yourself.  I’ve talked about editing in the past which included paying for an editor or trying to do it yourself.

I recently had a novel published and so far, I have had two people contact me and tell me of mistakes that are still in it.  How do I feel about that?  Embarrassed of course but I don’t know what I could have done to prevent it.  I went through the manuscript several times myself.  I have a program I use that points out redundancy in words, profanity, the wrong tense etc. and I always use it prior to sending a manuscript to my editor.  I think she does a great job of finding things I overlook but evidently this time we both failed.

I keep a novel by one of my favorite authors who now writes four books a year.  He is one of the most prolific writers out there today.  In one of the books he has a character who said he was a Soldier in the Army.  A few pages later he tells someone he went to “boot camp” and in the next chapter he talks about being in the Marines.  There are several disconnects there.  Soldiers are in the Army but they go to Basic Training.  Marines and Navy recruits go to Boot Camp.  Unless you are familiar with the military service it probably would not register as a series of mistakes but to an Army retiree like me, it was a red flag. Will I stop reading his novels because of this?  No way.  He’s still a very good story teller.  Will I look for mistakes in the future a little harder than I have in the past?  Probably.

Who didn’t catch the mistakes before the book was finished?  Him, his editor, his friend? Who knows. Point is we all make mistakes and nothing, or almost nothing in life is perfect and that goes for your writing and mine.  We can only do the best we can and let it go.  The consolation for us is that in most cases the person reading and finding the mistakes bought the book or magazine and we either have been or will get paid for the writing.

We can only do the very best we can, have somebody we trust take a look at the work and like a mama bird with a newly hatched birdie, kick it out of the nest and see if it can fly.

Yogi also said, “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”  Gotta love ol’ Yogi.