There is a particular satisfaction in revision that the euphoria generated by your first draft rarely matches. There’s something about returning to a manuscript, with a scalpel rather than a pen in hand, that yields a kind of pleasure that is almost surgical – not despite its precision, but because of it. A surgeon approaches a patient with just one thing in mind: to make the minimum necessary intervention and produce the maximum effect. And that’s precisely what’s on a writer’s mind when he...