Fussing, fiddling

About every third time I crack open The Manuscript That Wouldn't Die to cross off one more thing from the to do list, I wind up messing with something else entirely.

Almost entirely dialogue. I really obsess over dialogue, if I let myself. Keep doing these stupid, fiddly little things to scenes, here and there, convinced that naw, that's not quite right... she/he would say it this way...

Thing is, it was certainly arguable some of the scenes getting said treatment did benefit from the attention—and each time I'm sure it's at least an incremental improvement. But then, there's this little matter of priorities. And in honesty, I strongly suspect I'm bumping up against the law of diminishing returns, in a lot of places.

But I can't seem to help myself. It's like scratching an itch or something.

Gonna have to get some discipline here. Pick next thing on the list. Open file. Find that thing. Fix that thing. Save the file. Close the file. Cross thing off list. Repeat. Don't even look anywhere else. Do fiddly polishing stuff, if you still must, after you've finished with the list of stuff you actually know must get done.

Discipline sucks.

(Might note: there's a very similiar phenomenon in the world of software development. It's a truism that the developers never actually want to release the software: they'd keep right on polishing and refining 'til doomsday, if permitted. An architect with whom I used to work used to say 'There comes a time in the life of every project when you must shoot the developers and ship the code.')