Knowing when a draft is done is one of the harder practical questions in writing, and one of the least discussed. There is a great deal of advice about how to start writing and a reasonable amount about how to revise, but very little about how to stop — how to recognise the moment when further work is no longer improving the piece and the draft should be called finished.

This matters more than it might seem. A draft revised past its best is not the same as a draft that was never revised at all, but it has its own set of problems: the over-explained argument, the sentence that was once natural and is now laboured, the piece that has been smoothed into something careful but flat. Knowing when to stop is part of the craft.

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