I went through 20-30 drafts of every chapter of my book. It seems incredible to me now, and somewhat insane, but really I couldn't have let it go any other way. And it got way better every single time. I'm judging a literary prize now, reading back to back fiction, and I *really* wish some of these authors had gone through their book at the finetuning-the-language level a couple more times. The comparison with visual artists (musicians, etc) is a good one. It can be exciting to get fast about writing, especially when kicking out those early drafts (yay word count! thousands! tens of thousands!). And all of us do so much casual writing, blogging, emails, whatever, that it's easy to get a bit casual about it, I think. But a book is not a tweet :) ... I'm so happy you have the time to sink it to your writing right now. It's making me remember what is so fantastic about a residency, and long for some residency time myself!

I did ten formal drafts of Bodies in Motion, although in truth, some paragraphs were worked over far more than ten times. :-)