Quotes About Drafts

Only in very rare circumstances will you see something cut out of my first drafts. Maybe it's because of the way I write. I'm very focused on the logical progression of the story, and every character has a role to play.

Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.

I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.

but not what it meant to her. Not how it felt. Because stories, maybe, were drafts of reality based on feelings.

According to the chalkboard, tonight was "Ladies Night" featuring "Dollar Drafts for Chicks," a marketing ploy that drew in, it appeared, a certain female clientele. For example, one straw-haired woman, who was cackle-laughing in a "notice me" manner, wore a yellow T-shirt that read "Sloppy Seconds," which, alas, seemed all too apropos. Megan

When I made '1983,' there were a bunch of tracks that were in the early drafts that didn't make it because they just sounded like tracks for rappers, and that's not really the sound I look for when I produce my own albums.

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

I think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it's weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound.

I don't sit down and write a song, and then slam down the phone like, 'We got another one!' and pop some champagne. It's like if someone's writing a novel: You write a series of drafts.

Drafts would be written out in his hunched cursive, the words growing fatter as his pencil dulled against the page.

Sitting down in the evenings became a kind of torture, a bleak realization of her talents laid out against the bright shimmering fabric of her dreams. Yet she couldn't stop, she couldn't give up so easily. To stop writing completely produced in her a bleak and relentless depression, so she stubbornly persisted, plodding through endless drafts and revisions, telling herself she was learning something each time.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

I've seen a couple mock drafts that have me going to the Baltimore Ravens. And if it happens like that, it'll be a blessing. But I'd like to go anywhere that calls my name.

When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.

I normally keep a series of draft in a catalogue type of book in which I scribble, sketch and draw ideas.

When I began to write and used a typewriter, I went through three drafts of a book before showing it to an editor.

You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter.

Most of my early work was done on typewriter. And the only way to iterate drafts was to re-type it.