6th draft and counting...

I don't think their is a limit. It's just when ever your happy, but the more the change, edit and rewite things for the more you'll get sick of your story. So I sugest you take a long break froom your NaNo 06 novel and focus on other things, then come back to it in a while and read over it again.

It works like that with most things, the more you fiddle with them the more you hate them.

Take a nice, long break. At least four weeks if possible.

Now see, that's what I've been doing. I haven't touched it since last summer (2006) but I'm wondering if I should tweak it anymore....

How many times have you guys edited your novels?

If it's been a sufficently long time since you've looked at it, I suggest you open the story and read through it without changing anything. It probably won't be as bad as you think. Then read over it a second time, and don't change anything again, but make notes in a seperate file about what you think could/should be changed. For example, in chapter one, you might say, "I don't like how X is acting with Y". Do that for the whole novel. Then look at your whole list and decide if those things really do need to be changed, or are you just suffering from 'I'm never going to be happy with it'-itis?

I don't think there is a limit as to how many times a novel should or shouldn't be written. It needs to be done to your standards, basically, or until you get to the point where you know you've done the best you can do, even if it's not perfect (which it never will be). You may consider asking a trusted friend or family member to read it if you're at a real loss.

Thanks for that...

I'm on my fifth rewrite of my novel. I wrote most of the first draft during NaNo '06, and "finished" it by January '07. Of course, I knew that it was little more than a grammatically proper junk heap that would need massive work before it was readable. I took two months off, went to a writing conference, confirmed that I had written a junk heap, and then began my first rewrite in late March of '07.

...And I'm still going. I'm fairly sure that my current rewrite will be my last. People ask me why I've put myself through all this, or they tell me that I'm just being obsessive and that I should just send off what I have. But only you, the writer, know what your vision for the novel is, and if you haven't achieved that yet (or, perhaps, an alternate version of your vision that works just as well), there's no reason to prematurely declare it finished. I know that none of my previous drafts were publishable novels -- the style was good, the characters developed, the dialogue snappy... but the story just didn't work. One plot point didn't lead to another. No matter how tired I was of rewriting the same novel over and over, there was no way I could put it to rest. (I did take breaks between drafts, though, which was helpful.)

There's no set number of drafts or rewrites that'll get you a finished product. There's not even an estimate. I know writers who can just get out a first draft and then do an "edit" and then feel ready to send the work out. And then there are authors like Junot Diaz, who worked on his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao for eleven YEARS. But it won the Pulitzer Prize.

Get help! ... and I don't mean a psychiatrist :)

The best thing I've done was join a small group of writers with a common goal to edit our novels and get them ready for publication. Having a 2nd and third opinion has been great for me. Since we're all writer's, with our 'babies' up for critique, we're very gentle with our opinion, and very thorough with our editing.

In my group there are three of us and we meet once a week. Each week we go over one person's work At the end of our meeting, the next person on the rotation hands out their chapter for critique the following week.

Having an outside audience really helps with those ningling questions that haunt you... will the reader laugh at my joke, did I use the right punctuation, does this make any sense or is it a load of crap.

We're almost 2/3 of the way through my novel,, and I'll have it ready to pitch to a editor during our local writer's conference in October. Because I already have two 'professional' opinions, I have ever so much more confidence in my manuscript, which I expect will make me more effective in my presentation.

I highly recommend this process to everyone - but do offer a word of caution - chose your critiquing partners well. They can make or break the success of the group.

Generally speaking, you know when its done when because you've sent it in. You can rewrite forever, so you just have to put a time limit on it and then let it go. To publish, it just has to be finished, it doesn't have to be great. The majority of books, in fact, are just okay kind of books.

All of that said, however, the sixth rewrite is probably not a bad place to be, so long as its getting better. If it turns into a new story every time you touch it, then you might want to go back to ground zero and figure out what you really want to write about.