Quotes About Editing

In a print interview, as you may or may not know, they can do whatever they want. And they do. This is why most people are more hesitant to do print, because they can change it, and they do change it. They even change things that are in quotation marks, which is a pet peeve of mine.

Almost always, shortening a sentence improves it. A nice short sentence feels like something has been left out, which helps give it the element of surprise.

The copy editor looks for inconsistencies in content (does your character have blue eyes in Chapter 1, and green eyes in Chapter 30?

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.

PROOFREADER'S MARKS

In a way, editing is not unlike the movies. The best books, just like the best movies, are a collaboration. They're only as good as the compromise made between the artists involved.

The amazing thing about rotoscoping is that it's very malleable. Unlike green screen, where the computer subtracts out the background, rotoscoping is an additive technology in that you don't take anything away from the footage - you add layers on top of it.

I don't think about the reader when I'm writing, but I do when I'm editing, of course. For instance, I self-consciously didn't want to do anything to increase the divide between mothers and nonmothers - I think that divide is so horrible and destructive and unnecessary.

Film, for me, is in two stages. One is when I write the script more or less on my own - that's the nice bit. And then comes for me the unpleasant bit when they all go off, 100 people - actors and camera people and film and sound - and I stay away. When they go into the editing room, I come in again, and that's the bit I like.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

The truth is a lot of people doing professional video editing and things like that are using these displays that are mounted in place and they have stands already. When they upgrade displays, they take them out and put them in the same place and they don't need to buy new mounts and new stands for them.

Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn't work, throw it away.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

Editing is the only process. The shooting is the pleasant work. The editing makes the movie, so I spend all my life in editing

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.

I'm a rewriter. That's the part I like best . . . once I have a pile of paper to work with, it's like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture.

I work eight hours a day, but I'm not writing all that time. I'm thinking, editing, looking something up. Thinking is what I do a lot of.

Writing is about hypnotizing yourself into believing in yourself, getting some work done, then unhypnotizing yourself and going over the material coldly.

Historians who stuff in every item of research they have found, every shoelace and telephone call of a biographical subject, are not doing the hard work of selecting and shaping a readable story.

Don't be afraid to discard work you know isn't up to standard. Don't save junk, just because it took you a long time to write it.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

The second draft is on yellow paper, that's when I work on characterizations. The third is pink, I work on story motivations. Then blue, that's where I cut, cut, cut.