Quotes About Editing

Movies become art after editing. Instead of just reproducing reality, they juxtapose images of it. That implies expression; that's art.

You just can't make bad writing look good. But if you have good writing, you just say it, and it's almost done.

Grant, if we edited Fortran, I assume that you'd put a column thing in there.

My undergrad degree was in graphic design, and I don't work in that anymore, but I obviously do a lot of design and editing and Photoshopping, and the Adobe Creative Cloud is essential!

I made adult films for over 12 years. Apart from the directing aspect, I did all of it - the filming, the editing and the stills. I shot about 300 movies, which was great fun.

I loved editing, and being a cookbook editor is a really a great job.

I don't like to do any editing on guitars. I think the more editing you do, it just takes away from the feel of the performance.

But deleting work is sometimes the best decision you that you can make. Because you try and make this thing, that you know in your gut isn't right, and you just have to let it go. You have to be brutal.

Interestingly, relatively few of my correspondents were of the variety familiar to most authors, the users of block capitals and red ink.

I'm not a person who believes in the great difference between women and men as editors. But I do think that quality is key. We're very good at organizing and discipline and patience, and patience is 50 per cent of editing. You have to keep banging away at something until you get it to work. I think women are maybe better at that.

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

It's wonderful to work on footage by someone who understands how to get it to cut right, which a lot of directors don't.

Adapting a book is the most difficult thing because half the time you are wondering what to remove.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

The smartest thing I ever did as a writer was hire a retired conservation agent to blaze a hiking trail for me. It's nothing fancy - just a narrow path that meanders for a little over a mile through the woods near my home. But that trail through the trees has become my therapist, my personal trainer, and my best editor.

There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.

A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.

When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.

Having your book edited is like watching your cat being operated on. It's uncomfortable and someone is probably going to get hurt. Most likely the cat. But in the end, things work out for the best and your cat is better it. And then your cat gets released in hardcover, and you have to read all of his reviews.

I feel like my art is very eclectic. I have taken my favorite things - be that costume designing, fashion sense, music and video editing - and I threw them all into one big clump. And that's what I do.

The excitement of wading into 'reality' and just finding out what happens - and then the challenge of selecting those things that happened and shaping them in the editing into a narrative that will have appeal and be engaging - is a great, great thrill.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

Cut your manuscript ruthlessly but never throw anything away: it's amazing how often a discarded scene or description, which wouldn't fit in one place, will work perfectly later.

Like any decent researcher, I throw away 90% of my research.