The dangers of too much revision………………..

“During that night’s journey I decided, as a matter of experiment, to visit someone I knew, a young professor of English. I found him outside his apartment house— perched comically on the eraser end of a giant pencil standing in the middle of the street. He was stranded perhaps fifty feet up in the air— and he was truly stranded , because the only way he could keep the pencil balanced on its point was to sit right where he was. As soon as he tried to rescue himself by climbing down the side, the pencil began to topple, and he had to scramble back up to the top. I thought it was an amusing metaphor; it was well known that he’d spent years working on a paper that was vital to his career—but, rather than risk submitting it to one of the scholarly journals, he kept revising it endlessly. “

Daniel Quinn, Dreamer (pp. 178-179).  . Kindle Edition.