Neil Simon could afford to rewrite his play 22 times because he was doing it for himself, according to his personal whims. Folks who write for magazines, papers, ad copy, etc. all must work on a deadline and don't get time to perfect their prose.

I think of the playwrights, novelists and poets who work according to their own deadlines and standards as akin to opensource developers working on their personal projects. They can try different approaches, rewrite code, and recode APIs as much as they like in the pursuit of not only correctness but beauty as well.

One advantage writers (at least the succesful ones) have is editors. A good editor is a treasure who will take your work and trash awkward or redundant passages, suggest new directions, and spur you on to do work beyond what you thought possible. Pair programming in XP and user feedback in opensource projects can emulate this, at least in the details, but you can't beat a dedicated editor for attention to both the forest and the trees.