Quotes About Editing

He was notorious for cutting short extraneous verbiage from over-loquacious barristers.

I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published. "Why," I asked, "rewrite what's already in print?" He looked at me, vaguely; then said, "Well, obviously it's not finished.

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.

Journalists have so much newsprint to fill, the details are the last of their considerations.

My parents were in the book business, my brothers still run the Dutton bookstores in Los Angeles, and I've been interested in editing books and journals all of my life.

I finished the rough draft of 'Crying in H Mart' in July of 2020. My editor had it for five to six months, so I was free from it for a little while. I decided to take that time to start working on a new album.

I wish we had fewer bad words in 'Jump Street.' That would probably be better.

I remember walking into the editing room when I was a junior in college, and I watched the guy make cuts, and I didn't know what the hell was going on. He was just putting these shots together and telling the story, and it was amazing.

The first draft is usually junk. You have to work on it seven to eight times.

If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.

Something about writing needs a sort of distance not to be involved as a writer - just something that makes it easier to write. You have to make choices all the time - what to tell and what not to tell.

American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.

One good thing about animation is that, if you do screw up a line, they won't use it. You can keep going until it's right.

I'm a big fan of editing and keeping only the interesting bits in.

We Need To Talk About Kevin,' as an adaptation, was pretty major. It's a long book, and it's in letters, so it was a real editing experience to boil that down and make it cinematic. I learned a lot doing that film.

I always feel like the editing room is like coming into the kitchen. What kind of a meal do you make from there? It can be anything.

In the very beginning, women were editors because they were the people in the lab rolling the film before there was editing. Then when people like D. W. Griffith began editing, they needed the women from the lab to come and splice the film together. Cecil B. DeMille's editor was a woman. Then, when it became a more lucrative job, men moved into it.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

After a time, Fogelin shifted into writing and editing manuals. Often lampooned, these texts, if studied with a fanaticism ordinarily reserved for the Bible, revealed a multitude of secrets.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing - 'Oh, let's put that sentence there, let's get rid of this' - have become commonplace in films and music too.

It takes a long time to write something that is easy to read.

George Washington rewrote the presidential addresses crafted for him by others so as to omit all references to Jesus Christ.

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine

Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.