What about editing?

What about editing?

When I write a book, I don’t leave it to an editor to do all the tidying up, the trawling and correcting. The chances are, for every time I write a phrase, I will edit it about four times, and even then, I regret the words that didn’t make it onto the page.

Writing, for me, is at best a compromise, rather like the one that faces a youngster deciding what to do with his or her life: the horizon is so wide, which way should they go? What subjects should they study, specialis...