Dialectics: Short Stories and... you'll have to read it to find out the other thing

As you know, I'm writing a short story in English... So far, I've set up my characters and a plot and I'm getting to hammering through draft on of the whole story. Soon i'm gonna have to comb through the entire story to fix the problems, the things that are going wrong (and not the bad things happening to the characters, the things that don't make the situation absolutely perfectly tense or miserable or scary. Or whatever it's supposed to be.) I also have to make sure the characters are perfect... and I mean perfect the same way i meant it before. And I'll have to do this more than once. I really don't know how I'm supposed to dive into short story writing... and I found a parallel in my own life when I went to rehearsal today. The director and I were talking about the process of putting together a show. Picking a cast is like picking the characters, and the first full draft of a short story is like finishing the blocking of a show: You know what's supposed to happen but everything isn't just right yet. Then the further drafts are the combing and cleaning of a show. And finally, the most rewarding (or sometimes, sadly, disappointing) is the presentation: publishing, opening night, whatever you wanna call it. In a way, I'm staging a show on paper instead of onstage.