'Addiction' feels like the wrong word. 'Compulsion' feels more apt. Whether or not we choose a pejorative probably should be a function of the results. In some people, an unreleting devotion to revision is fruitless because their sensibiity is unreliable. "I'm making it better!" they may claim, but a reliable observer may be right in saying they're just screwing the work up. We have a number of paintings by Savo Radulovic. My elders, who knew Savo and built up the family collection, said the trick was to pull the painting away from him at some point.
As a writer given to much revision, my worry is that too prolonged and intense focus on one highly intricate, difficult scene tends to expand the number of lines in the scene. "Ah! At last I've made that bit clear!" -- at cost to the overall composition. For the "artist", imagination is a great thing to have, but without a reliable governing sensibility it can be ruinous -- somewhat like the dedicated athlete who "over-trains". Still, we have numerous variorum editions of great novels, showing them at various stages of their writing, and again and again we see the value of the writer's pertinacity (and sometimes his editor's). Perhaps I can suggest the complexity of the demands on sensibility in creative writing by this: A while back I cited five or six of the most memorable chapters from novels in world literature; the astonishing thing about all of them was this: Not one of them "advanced the plot". If one's "sensibility" were confined to the dictates in the standard "how to write fiction" texts, all six of those chapters would probably have been deleted before the final manuscript went to press.
