Quotes About Editing

The writing profession that I have always known is changing, old media is ossified, and what I know of new media is that it is casual, opinionated, improvisational, largely unedited, full of whoppers, often plagiarized, and poorly paid.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

The real art is knowing what to leave out, not what to put in.

For me, I think [art] exists in a cave. I am in a cave. I have my own editing place, but I'm not powerful enough to amass the resources to keep doing movies every two or three years.

I had to cut a lot of things I wanted to keep [in The Art of Elegance]. I'm going to have to do a part two for sure.

If you look at any list of great modern writers such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, you'll notice two things about them: 1. They all had editors. 2. They are all dead. Thus we can draw the scientific conclusion that editors are fatal.

Everybody does have a book in them, but in most cases that's where it should stay.

Over the past decade Stallman created a powerful editing program called Gnu-Emacs. But Gnu's much more than just a text editor. It's easy to customize to your personal preferences. It's a foundation upon which other programs can be built. It even has its own mail facility built in. Naturally, our physicists demanded Gnu; with an eye to selling more computing cycles, we installed it happily.

The privilege of portraying any role in life is not in the packaging or editing of the character, but in the acceptance of a responsibility that defines the role.

It's the living that turn and chase the dead. The long bones and skulls are tumbled from their shrouds, and words like stones thrust into their rattling mouths: we edit their writings, we rewrite their lives.

Of course I have had to rearrange the text a bit— bugger about with it, as Hébert would say.

I've received two key pieces of advice in regard to my books. The first is, "You should lay off the f-bombs." The other is, "You should add more f-bombs.

When editing begins it is on 'large chunks' – paragraphs or a series of related paragraphs perhaps – and their relationship to one another. She moves them around as a way of answering her structural questions. More specific editing processes are involved too, like those we saw in the example from Woolf's work: deletion, insertion, and attention to repetition and abstraction

Forced to weigh your words, you find out which are the styrofoam and which are the heavy gold. Severe cutting intensifies your style, forcing you both to crowd and to leap.

In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And if any passage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could possibly come out — take it out and see what the story looks like that way. Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up without a seam. It's as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it's trying to achieve, and will take that shape if you'll only clear away the verbiage.

You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.

I made so many films I thought were great and they turned out horrible, and I made films I did not believe in at all, and 'Shadow Of The Vampire' was one of these films I did not believe in during the shooting. And then when I saw it I was surprised what they had made out of it. They edited for quite a long time.

Many families would like to avoid burdening future generations with inherited diseases such as haemophilia or severe developmental disorders. But most would think it wrong to edit the genes that influence the 'normal' range of human variation, from eye colour to intelligence or athletic ability.

Films have gotten leaner and leaner, cutting out all variations from the story line.

Every cell in our body, whether it's a bacterial cell or a human cell, has a genome. You can extract that genome - it's kind of like a linear tape - and you can read it by a variety of methods. Similarly, like a string of letters that you can read, you can also change it. You can write, you can edit it, and then you can put it back in the cell.

My job as an editor is to gently prod the attention of the audience to look at various parts of the frame. And that - I do that by manipulating how and where I cut and what succession of images I work with.

I suppress the vast majority of what I write.

Amanda Hocking and Hugh Howey have been successful in their self-publishing ventures. But notice that Hocking would prefer to write and hand over the editing, promotion, and selling to a traditional publisher.