Recently I’ve been agonizing over the perfect draft. You see, I’m writing a dissertation and, as my topic of choice includes ever-changing content, I’m constantly reevaluating my work. Is it current enough? Should the structure change again? Is this ready to be reviewed? Will I just be wasting their time? What else might I think about including? Have I done too much? What if something happens tomorrow that changes everything? What if…? It’s a complicated little game I play in my own head. While my dissertation may be the most important document I’ve tackled so far, I experience this type of reservation with every paper I’ve ever written and every presentation I’ve ever planned to give: when is the draft perfect?
One of the difficulties of attending to a “perfect” draft is that I really don’t think there is such a thing. Sure, you can have a great and wonderful draft… but a draft is a draft. There is always another way of doing what you’re doing. There’s always another angle from which to approach the topic. There is always a “better” way of framing what you want to say. Things always change. The thing that I wrestle with is when my draft is good enough to give to others for feedback. Too soon leaves your reader returning a paper littered with red pen marks and notes in the margins about things you already knew. Too late and you’ll work yourself into a corner you can’t escape from easily or — worse — you’ll have followed the wrong path for a really long time and have to rewrite everything anew. It’s a delicate balance and I don’t yet have the answer. At this stage in my writing process I think that sending it off would be too soon. I hope that I’m not wrong. I also hope that I don’t send it too late.