I do not know a story is finished because I can no longer find anything to change. I know I am getting close when the changes I can still make are no longer making the story more itself—and when the urge to keep editing starts sounding more like fear than craft.

Revision is where the real story starts to emerge for me. I do not think of it as a stage of “fixing mistakes,” at least not primarily. Revision is where I figure out what the draft is actually trying to be, what it is already doing well, what it is failing to do, and how to help it become more fully itself. Drafting gets the material onto the page. Revision is where I discover what shape that material was always reaching toward. When I first come back to a draft, the things