Quotes About Drafting

As a lawyer, I can assure you that a lot of document drafting is repetitive, involving cutting and pasting from templates. But the best lawyers bring a unique perspective to the process and anticipate clients' problems.

As New Zealanders, we've been in on the United Nations from the very beginning, played a role in the drafting of the charter - it means a lot to us that those processes are followed.

My university degree is in art and, yes, I do a lot of drawing for all my books. I have a big drafting table set up in a spare bedroom and I cover it with maps and house plans and sketches that I use in the books. Also, I truly love architecture, so that plays a big part in all my books.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.

Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist.

I mean drafting is a hard process because you're picking between 23-year-olds sometimes and 19-year-olds that have great upside, and some guys that are just great character but have limited physical skills, and some guys that have amazing upside and that are a little more immature, and everywhere in between.

If you hit two crappy pages, even if you never use them, you can feel "successful" for the day. Sometimes you barely eke out two pages, and they are truly terrible. But at least 50% of the time, you'll produce perhaps 5, 10, or even—on the rare miracle day—20 pages. Draft ugly and edit pretty.

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.

I tend to start with a kernel, a vague concept, and just begin to write things down - notes about a character, lines of dialogue, descriptive passages about a place. One idea fires another. I do that for about a year. By then there's a story, and I'll go on to a complete first draft that sews many of those ragtag pieces together.

Group discussion is very valuable; group drafting is less productive.

They keep talking about drafting a constitution for Iraq. Why don't we just give them ours? It was written by a lot of really smart guys. It's worked for over 200 years, and Hell, we're not using it anymore.

It may occur to you that we had better wait until the Bill is drafted, and can be then criticised in detail and on its merits. But it is, on the other hand, easier to destroy such a creature in the embryonic stage than after birth. Its emergence into print, as a serious legislative proposal, endorsed (unless I am misinformed) by the active or passive concurrence of the entire Episcopate, would of itself be a scandal to our Church of the gravest kind.

If I revise a children's book, if I'm spending three hours on the first draft, I'm probably spending 30 minutes revising it. I mean, come on! But to redo a painting? That's hard work.

So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.

I understood it's a business as far as when you're drafting someone, and you want a guy you can trust. But there were no questions on my ability or character.

But if one can lock the door, disconnect the telephone, and sit down to wrestle with the report for five or six hours without interruption, one has a good chance to come up with what I call a "zero draft"—the one before the first draft. From then on, one can indeed work in fairly small installments, can rewrite, correct, and edit section by section, paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence.

I'm a big believer in puking out all your thoughts in a single sitting and getting some version of the work down, because the alternative just prolongs the agony. The first draft is hideous and ajskdlkdfksjdfslfjk, but it's just a map for where the big blocks go.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.

If you happen to start a new country in the 1990s, you have the advantage of drafting new laws with the knowledge that the Internet is out there.

How does a cranky, demanding coach create the most cohesive team in all of sports? One common answer is that the Spurs are smart about drafting and developing unselfish, hardworking, team-oriented individuals. This is a tempting explanation, because the Spurs clearly make a concerted effort to select high-character individuals. (Their scouting template includes a check box labeled "Not a Spur." A check in this box means the player will not be pursued, no matter how talented he is.)

I have not seen a true grounds-up revolution from a bunch of companies getting together. It takes one company to put it together, then people draft off of that, but they don't build it top to bottom with a specific vision.

No opposition party wants to assign so much power to another party. In drafting socialist programs, everybody assumes tacitly that he himself will be the planner or the dictator, or that the planner or dictator will be intellectually completely dependent on him and that the planner or dictator will be his handyman.

Let go of the idea that somehow you can outsmart a first draft. Because I have never met anybody who can.