Quotes About Editing

In my first draft every sentence I put down is to advance the story. Each subsequent draft - the 3rd, the 7th, the 27th - is trying to turn each of those sentences into a poem.

Kill your darlings.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

You'd think that the ability to write lucid prose would be the bottom line for any publishing novelist, but it is not so... You would expect that proofreaders and copy editors would pick this sort of stuff up even if the writers of such embarrassing English do not, but many of them seem as illiterate as the writers they are trying to bail out.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

The worst thing you can do is censor yourself as the pencil hits the paper. You must not edit until you get it all on paper. If you can put everything down, stream-of-consciousness, you'll do yourself a service.

Vigorous writing is concise. 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.1

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what's left. —KRUG'S THIRD LAW OF USABILITY Of

Don't run the camera nonstop. Even if you're going to edit later, it's a bad habit that will only cost you time when you have to watch tons of thoughtless, unusable footage.

The most memorable home videos and docs tell stories. Those stories don't just magically appear in the edit room. You have to imagine them before you start shooting.

Modern biblical scholars have established that the Bible is a wiki. It was compiled over half a millennium from writers with different styles, dialects, character names, and conceptions of God, and it was subjected to haphazard editing that left it with many contradictions, duplications, and non sequiturs.

Social psychologists have found that we are overconfident, sometimes to the point of delusion, about our ability to infer what other people think, even the people who are closest to us.27 Only when we ask those people do we discover that what's obvious to us isn't obvious to them. That's why professional writers have editors.

I often find that when a ruthless editor forces me to trim an article to fit into a certain number of column-inches, the quality of my prose improves as if by magic. Brevity is the soul of wit, and of many other virtues in writing.

Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!

Though bad writing has always been with us, the rules of correct usage are the smallest part of the problem. Any competent copy editor can turn a passage that is turgid, opaque, and filled with grammatical errors into a passage that is turgid, opaque, and free of grammatical errors. Rules of usage are well worth mastering, but they pale in importance behind principles of clarity, style, coherence, and consideration for the reader.

I love editing. It's one of my favorite parts about filmmaking.

I love the writing. I love the idea of typing and seeing it on the computer and printing it out myself and, you know, moving sentences around. I like that.

I love the editing process of making movies. I just wish that life had one.

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

I love retouching images on Photoshop.

I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema, writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

When I started editing on my home computer, I said to myself, 'Well, I could be at home studying for a class or I could be at home editing a video.'

The first draft of anything is shit.