Do you ever think of your old books, “I should have phrased this differently in this or that paragraph,” or “I wish I’d changed this or that about the storyline and characters?”
Not much.
a) I was so totally walking on eggshells with my publisher that I didn’t insist on scene separators (e.g., three asterisks between paragraphs to tell the reader “we’re somewhere or somewhen else now”) and also didn’t fix a dozen or so places where the publisher slammed one scene directly into another without even an intervening white space.
b) I would have added a small additional paragraph late in the book, if I could reach back and do so. Or if my book sold so well that it got to have “Second Edition” or whatever. But I don’t lose sleep over it.
c) I made an actual factual error, misattributing a song to the wrong artist. I would fix that of course, but I don’t lose sleep over that either.
I recognize a lot of mistakes I made in my first book, but I know why I made them and I’m not particularly interested in revisiting them. And they were good lessons. They were necessary to help me improve as a writer.
None. Once the story is done, I move on to another. I don’t often reread my published work, but rarely see anything to change. And, of course, there’s the mantra “They paid me for this.”
Sometimes, especially for the novel I wrote.
Yes. I write non-fiction, and new people have new ideas that change my thinking or add to it in interesting ways. As the saying goes, no book is ever finished, it just gets handed over to the publisher. And as Terry Pratchett noted, "Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can’t possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.”
A little bit. For non-fiction, I see the occasional sentence I’d rephrase, or a fact I could update or make clearer. For fiction and poetry, by the time I’m ready to send it out or publish it, I feel pretty enduringly good about it. Might catch and change a repeated word here or there, when feasible.
I sometimes go back to older writing and see passages that make me go “how did I think of that?”
OTOH, I just sent in an 11,000 word article and I wanted to rewrite the whole thing by the final read. I think - hope - that I’m just sick of it after a month of fiddling. When it comes out it’ll probably look better.
But all you can do is try to be better in the future. Regret is a time-waster.
Not too much. If any readers found a major error I’d go back and fix it, but I don’t worry too much about typos. I’m already on to writing the next book.
All the time. Never published a thing i was completely happy with, and when I’ve had stuff reprinted I’ve always taken the opportunity to revise. I’ve got a finished novel now with rights issues and every few months i give it a read and invariably make a few changes. If the rights never resolve, I’ll change a dozen words out of 200,000 every year, all for the better.