Quotes About Editing

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.

Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

If you have to go back and spell-check the text you're about to send, you're saying too much.

I don't do a lot of editing post-shoot, but I use Lightroom to play with contrast and texture and to remove dust.

I never did, and I never will, thank any man for altering any one word of my compositions without my privity.

Every morning, we choose between milk or tea or coffee. Usually, I know what I like, but I don't rule out changing my idea sometimes. The editing process is one of the most important parts in everyday life. The same is with my work: mistakes are part of the decision-making process.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

The one thing a lifetime in the newspaper business teaches you is pace - you spend all your time trying to make sure that the reader's going to finish what you're writing.

In my experience, with very few exceptions - I am, as it happens, one of the exceptions - the one thing that most editors don't want to do is edit. It's not nearly as conducive to a successful career as having lunch out with important agents or going to meetings where you get noticed.

What I don't have in theater is editing.

When I am shooting, I am inside the theatre, when I am in the editing room, I am inside the theatre. I always try to feel what they will feel. I see a film, not as a director, but as the audience. If I am entertained, they will be, too.

what makes a story unique is not necessarily the information in the story but what the writer chooses to put in or leave out.(pg. 146-147)

There are three primal urges in human beings: food, sex, and rewriting some else's play.

Her edition, though, did make two errors, acceptable at that time: as her mother had done before her, she imposed titles on untitled poems and she standardised punctuation, not grasping how vital Dickinson's punctuation may be to the way we read her.

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply 'pencil work' as John O'Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

think we get in trouble when this process of editing is disrupted—when we can't edit, or we don't know what to edit, or our environment doesn't let us edit.

I've been a teacher at the college level, in composition mostly, and I've been an editor on magazines.

I'm a student. I want to do better, and I want directors who can find the actress in me and be my teachers. I'm interested in the whole process of editing, post-production and direction.

The rhythm of editing, the length of a frame- these are not merely dictated by the professional need to establish a link with the audience (as they are thought to be). They express the character and the originality of the author of the film. At the present time cineastes use editing rhythm to gild the pill that has to be swallowed by the unfortunate audience. According to me, entirely in order to make money.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The work is performed, first by railing at the stupidity, negligence, ignorance, and asinine tastelessness of the former editors