My relationship to tweaking is going to be different to yours, mostly because of my relationship with deadlines (years of procrastination and zero publishing), and because I'm only dealing with text, which is a much lesser effort.

A good part of tweaking was me just realizing that what I wrote was actually bad, which happens fairly often, although there's the occasional time where I read something which I remember not liking, but then it's good somehow. As far as tweaking stuff, this is the most emotionally straining part because my appreciation of my own work hits me in the face. It can feel chaotic, like a rollercoaster of always changing appreciation. But eventually I enter a more calcified state where it's all in the back of my head. There are fewer surprises, and I have more control over how I perceive the flaws and qualities. A bit like rewatching a movie several times; just because you've written it yourself doesn't mean you've fully appreciated your own work. Here our experiences may differ, because the very large spans of time I spend between revisions can mean my appreciation varies a lot more.

In the second "calcified" state of tweaking, it's going to be a more introspective exercise, more cerebral. There are things that I will obviously like or dislike, and sometimes there will be vaguer things that I'm not sure what I feel about. Recently I've gone over what I'd written, and spent about a week just walking around in a park with my laptop, asking myself what I disliked about it, how it could be changed, and so on. It's a more puzzle-solving mindset where I can spend hours without the faintest idea of how I address any of my concerns, like solving a Sudoku and finding the exact configuration of elements that respect all the constraints. But the answers come, eventually, and they're often very satisfying; a bit like reading a plot-twist that you didn't see coming.

And then you do it again, because major changes will decalcify your relationship to your work. After enough iterations, the nagging feelings are replaced by the feelings that things are "harmonized." Even though the nagging feelings never quite go away, there's a point where you just say "but it's pretty good though."

These apply to broader structure and narrative. It's going to be slightly different for a scene, or paragraph, or sentence. The broader idea still applies; there's a state of emotional instability, followed by a calcification, and then an analytical/introspective phase. I've had to retwrite some scenes 3 times - literally changing the action and what happens - before I got something that "stayed good." That said, my long spans of procrastination mean I don't do this as often because I see the broader issues before I care enough to fix a specific scene, so instead I delete the scenes! Or better, I recycle the parts of a scene I liked, and drop the parts I didn't care for! Which I guess is a way to tweak a flaw out!

For very micro tweaks like sentences or word choice, it's important to get out of your head before reading over the scene again, what some have called "reading with a pen" and "just reading," because a sentence doesn't *feel* the same if you've been mulling it over in your head for the past 5 minutes. Pacing can also get lost easily this way.

It's difficult for me to tell how much my tweaking experience would change if I iterated faster over my work. Because I'm a more character-driven story-teller, an issue with a scene is usually going to involve a character not acting quite right. Sometimes it involves slowing down to let them express something more clearly, and sometimes it's more complex, like I'm staring at a flaw in the character's arc, which means I have to reconsider what's going on with them.

For my recent rewrites, I've had characters that were ostracized and misfit, and as I dwelled on the things I disliked, I realized I had issues with those - which surprised me, because they were my favorite part of the story. One thing that I realized was that the characters felt like they had a lot of "emotional baggage" which ultimately boiled down to "parent does not understand" and "unusual personality makes it difficult to blend in," which didn't feel like it was *enough*. Finally, I realized that if my characters longed for an altogether different cultural setting (one is an outsider, and the other is part of the culture but wishing to escape the current culture), that suddenly explains a lot of their feelings of otherness, and what's more, the commonality between these feelings of otherness can help them bond (even though their experience is technically opposite).

I feel like this must be a common kind of experience when writing. It's interesting, because there's an obvious balance between the logical construction and analysis, and the emotional introspection of what makes it fit together in a compelling way.