Ernest Hemingway rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms thirty-nine times. Jack Kerouac spent six years revising On the Road—despite the myth that he wrote it in three weeks.

And it’s not just novelists. Malcolm Gladwell typically goes through dozens of drafts for his pieces. Mary Karr threw away...

Anyone can call themselves an editor. Plenty of people think that just because they: a) read a lot, b) are good at spotting typos, c) have written a book, or d) picture themselves wearing a tweed jacket and teaching Shakespeare to enraptured students on the coiffed lawns of Harvard, they can sell th...