The Fastidious Author’s Paradox

There's a famous ancient paradox by a guy who just loved to spit these things out, Zeno, called Zeno’s Dichotomy. It sometimes comes to mind when I'm editing my own books, and I wanted to suggest another addition to it, an addendum which I want to call: The Fastidious Author’s Paradox.

Zeno describes his paradox like a runner trying to, say, catch a bus. An ancient bus. The runner has to travel half the distance to the bus first. Then they have to travel half the remaining distance again. And again. But if the runner keeps halving the distance between them and the bus, the distance traveled gets smaller and smaller but they never actually reach the bus.

I sometimes think this is like editing your own books when you're a Fastidious Author. The Fastidious Author reads the book multiple times, and each pass makes corrections. And after multiple passes and multiple corrections, each time the Fastidious Author, ostensibly, makes fewer corrections. Eventually, the Fastidious Author is reading the book again, which might take a week, to make 8-9 corrections. And then reading the book again, which might take a week, to make 3-4 corrections. And reading the book again, which might take a week, to make 1-2 corrections.

The rub is ... the Fastidious Author will almost never stop making 1-2 corrections. The book, however, will always take the same amount of time to read.

The runner keeps running and the bus keeps idling at the stop, waiting. The Fastidious Author keeps editing and the book keeps being edited.

The trick to break the paradox: at some point the Fastidious Author, despite that there may be a gap that could be closed, needs to step back and say, "The runner gets on the bus."

Then they go back to the beginning, take a breath, and start running again.