If I produce a drawing or painting and leave it alone for a while, when I come back to it, there are things that stand out that need changing. I'll question why I did it like that in the first place. It could be that, while you're in the process of doing something creative, you can be so involved with it that you fail to see small errors and misjudgments made along the way.
For me, writing is the same. Having typed the words into my computer, I revisit them with a fresh eye and often have to make changes. A tweak here, a line modified there.
It could be that every time you leave a piece of work, you go away and undergo subtle changes in yourself. Your perspective might change, opinions might shift based on experiences that might happen to you whilst separated from your work. Then when you come back to it, you make changes to the work to realign it with your updated view on life. I wonder whether this process would ever end.
There comes a time when you have to force yourself to step away from the piece for fear of overworking it. How finished is finished?
After weeks of jotting, scribbling and word juggling with The Boy with an Axe in His Head, I'd arrived at something I was seeing as a whole. Sure, there were places I could still go, but somehow it didn't seem necessary to explore absolutely every aspect of having a handle protruding from the boy's head. The boy, by the way, is called Maxwell.
It was time to start thinking about the visual aspect.
Time to sharpen my pencils.
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