I can remember the day I became a revisionist; required reading for my High School’s AP reading class was Strunk and White’s Elements of Style and the one lesson I took home from it was that less can be more (not to say that the rest of the tiny book was any less useful, but this is the point that I took to heart). Later that same year I wrote a short story (“A Game of Chess”). Giving it a once over, I recalled Elements of Style and Strunked it. I cut out the first two pages, about another page and a half from the middle, and a little off the end.
Then I re-read it. It went from being a mediocre short story to being a viscously tight horror story.
I’m not obsessive about editing my writing. I always do a brief edit to spellcheck and I go through the motions of obeying grammar rules (not with any great enthusiasm, mind you – I figure I can always claim poetic liscense (who hands those things out anyways?)). But while I’ll tweak a few things here and there (I have a habit of leaving out entire words that I thought I had written down), I won’t sit on my writing for days to get it perfect.
On the other hand, I feel absolutely no guilt at all about going through my writing later and re-editing it until it barely resembles its original form. I love writing – but I’m not so attached to my words that I won’t erase them on a whim or pervert its meaning into twisted new forms.