Editing

As I edit my novel, which has by now been more than three years in the making, I find myself sometimes at odds with the person I was when I started writing it.  So now, just as I must frequently step into the shoes of my fictional characters to let them speak in an authentic voice, I must also step into the shoes of my younger self to keep the story the way I originally envisioned it.  Wounds that festered back then and made me write certain things, have long since healed and I have to scratch them open again to recapture the mindset that once guided me.  It works, but is it really necessary?  Perhaps there comes a point when a writer ought to stop shaping the content of his or her story—at least if work on it spans a long period of time—and focus solely on the language in which it written.  Sure, a writer's skill level may also change over the years (hopefully for the better), but most likely not as drastically as his or her emotional state or outlook on life. If you, my dear writer friends, have also worked on a single story for very long, please let me know what your experiences were. :-)