> When a fiction writer comes up with a plot, or even a turn of phrase that blows my mind, that's one of the best things about reading. Like "how did he think u

> When a fiction writer comes up with a plot, or even a turn of phrase that blows my mind, that's one of the best things about reading. Like "how did he think up all this?!" Typically the answer is: hard work and iteration, and many times not by himself. I think you're partially falling for the fallacy of the singular author completing a perfect work with unflinching vision. IMO this is incredibly rare. Take, for example, Harper Lee and To Kill a Mockingbird. It's an amazing book. It's a novel that might at once feel effortless and also an unaltered vision of the author. But it's actually the result of years of editing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harper_Lee): > Ms. Hohoff was impressed. "[T]he spark of the true writer flashed in every line", she would later recount in a corporate history of Lippincott.[16] But as Ms. Hohoff saw it, the manuscript was by no means fit for publication. It was, as she described it, "more a series of anecdotes than a fully conceived novel".[16] During the next couple of years, she led Lee from one draft to the next until the book finally achieved its finished form and was retitled To Kill a Mockingbird. Everything from the narrative structure to the title to characterization is refined, over and over again. The goal with feedback and subsequent editing isn't the dilution of an author's vision, it's the opposite. It concentrates and clarifies the vision with each successive pass.