Re-editing a story can go on for weeks, months, years, and even after it’s been edited five or ten times, we’ll find something else that can be fixed even though it already has been. It’s like working on a painting, and no matter how much detail and improvements are made to it, it can always be revamped if our eye catches something off.
The finished manuscript contains all the essentials and more: the plot is complete, the readability is smooth, and the spelling, grammar and punctuation are, for the most part, ironed out. But when we go back to read it weeks or months later, we’ll find things to change/add, such as the wording, dialogue, or we could decide on a completely new direction for the story. It never feels like it’s finished, even though it has to be at some point, since the purpose of all those countless hours of editing was to finish the story.
Besides, there is a finite amount of time that we can spend working on any one project. And then there are the countless other projects, which are bouncing around in our minds, that want to be told–put down on paper (or the computer). The final edit is the one that we decide is complete because if we spend anymore time on it, we’d never be done.
Fallton Havenstonne 