George Saunders recently wrote
that the process of revision, as he goes about it, is “a form of increasing the ambient intelligence of a piece of writing.” You crank out some prose, then make adjustments — tiny and not so tiny — until the prose is better. Then you do it again. Then, you do it again. The you as represented on the page changes by all these gradual adjustments, whether or not you’re writing in first person. Eventually, you’ve “revis[ed] yourself up” into a better and smarter person, someone more entertaining, more compassionate, wiser than you are in real life...