I have just finished a story.

It’s about a man on a plane who is not quite scared of flying: he is aware of flying.

Something bad happens on the flight as he discusses what makes a flight safer for the average passenger.

I have added transcripts from the flights black box recorder to give it tension and a fist of reality.

But, as usual, I haven’t finished - I’ve just put it down. I could go on for ever, editing and chopping parts around. It’s so annoying to never really feel perfectly fininshed.

I print it out to read it on paper, and on going through it, pencil in hand, discover so many little changes I want to make: punctuation that has a million different possibilities; word ordering that will make the most impact; factual errors that need changing; additions in dialogue, or description; mistakes in tense, and on and on and on.

All these things I notice are minor. The additions is a different matter though. That is where the temptation - it could be for the better, or it could be for the worse - becomes overwhelming. I read the text and know in my head that I need to be lean and economical but the words appear in my head demanding to be inserted into the text.

I read somewhere that a writer should be vigilant for the moments when they become enamored  with their own writing: they fall in love with the words they themselves have put on the paper, and can no longer see it critically. It becomes too sacred to touch. I have seen this in my writing but I have also seen the opposite; a constant tinkering, like a mechanic who becomes deaf to the sound of a car he is tuning, or a guitarist who no longer hears the notes as he is tuning up, just a hum he cannot place on the scale.