It’s been quite a few years since I started writing The Absent Heart (and two years since I visited RLS’s former home!) and the vast proportion of the hours I’ve spent with it have been in rewriting, but then as Robert Graves said, ‘There is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting’, an opinion echoed by many ‘greats’ including Hemingway and Updike. However there comes a point with any book when editing begins to feel fruitless, pointless tinkering with a something that is basicall...