Sixty years ago, I heard a presentation at a Jewish summer camp by a sculptor who was an Orthodox Jew. He observed the second commandment, which forbids the making of graven images, by creating a small defect before completing a sculpture. By design, it would not exactly represent the person or thing that was his subject.

This story that I heard as a teen has made me aware of the challenge of completing creative work. Some creators are perpetually revising to the point that the work is never completed. For others, a work is completed only because of a deadline, possibly self-imposed, for publication or presentation. Sometimes when a work has had the good fortune to find an ongoing audience, the creator continues to revise it.

One of the reviewers of Public Representations said we should publish it without changing a word. We, the authors, disagree, and we are continuing to make changes. We have just received the copyeditor’s markup of our manuscript. We appreciate that the copyeditor hasn’t tried to rewrite our book, and has concerned themself with mechanics such as grammar, spelling, and punctuation. (We agree with the copyeditor about the use of the serial comma, as in the previous sentence.) That will reduce our workload.

But our book has a lengthy reference list that pertains to the entire work, not reference lists for each chapter. We use many online sources and cite a few well-known critics (for example A.O. Scott and Anthony Lane) in several chapters. This makes checking the reference list complicated for both the copyeditor and for us. This will require some time.

As we work through the copyedited manuscript, my blog will go on radio silence for at least the next two weeks. We take the copyeditor’s work seriously and want to respond thoughtfully to their suggestions. We want our book to be as mechanically perfect as possible. But, to return to the Orthodox Jewish sculptor whose name I long ago forgot, every creative work has, and should have, its defects.