My writing teacher sent me this quote from a recent New Yorker profile of novelist Ian McEwan:

“You spend the morning and suddenly there are seven or eight words in a row. They’ve got that twist, a little trip that delights you. And you hope they will delight someone else. And you could not have foreseen it, that little row. They often come when you’re fiddling around with something that’s already there. You see it by revising a word order or taking something out, suddenly it tightens into what it was always meant to be.”

Yea, that’s about right.