Leaving your work to marinade

I have just received the best email notification ever, telling me that I am a finalist in the Fiction category of this year's Aesthetica Creative Works Competition, out of 4000 entries. The winner will be announced on December 01, so everybody keep their fingers crossed.

I'm telling you about this, as its an example of how you should leave a piece of work to marinade for anything from a few weeks to several years, and then go back to view it afresh. The story I entered for the above competition was originally 2,700 words in length, written in the third-person past tense, with an ending that didn't seem quite right and yet had no obvious alternative.

Fifteen years on  - yes, that long - it "called" to me from a drawer. Shaking the dust off it, I carried out a savage revision on it, knocking it down to 1,600 words, rewriting it in the first-person present tense, and giving it a completely new ending that I really liked.

And the moral of this tale? ...That following years of hard work and numerous knock-backs, success starts happening when...

1. You take on board constructive criticism from people whose expertise you respect.
2. You resist the temptation to enter the first draft of a piece of work into a competition, also applying this same rule to submission of work to publishers and agents.
3. And you don't let yourself be misled by stories in the press about writers who are overnight successes, as it's unlikely you're ever being told the full story.