Quotes About Editing

I always sent my mother all these huge books I made. When my mother died, I was cleaning her cupboard, and these big books were only 20 pages long. She edited out, maybe burned, every single photograph where I'm naked.

The art of the deletion: streamlining your prose, keeping it focused and true to the story's narrative pace without denuding it.

First draft, use your heart. Revision, use your head

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very;' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

It's funny with fiction - once you cut something, it hasn't happened anymore.

There are not that many people who know how to edit. It's a funny tiny little obscure talent but it's very special. You have to have the feeling of popular taste.

Put accurate punctuation at the heart of your writing.

I don't believe in "writers block." Lower your standards and keep writing. You can always go back later and make it better. Unless your name is Harlan Ellison, in which case your sentences come out perfectly parsed each time.

The main advantage of books over life is that they can be redrafted and redrafted, whereas life, alas, is always a first draft.

So we need, more than ever, to know how to edit the world, so it can never break us down.

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

Superficially, Edit and Pray seems like "working with care," a very professional thing to do. The "care" that you take is right there at the forefront, and you expend extra care when the changes are very invasive because much more can go wrong. But safety isn't solely a function of care.

Almost the first thing I learned about being an editor was that it was hard work. To be sure, ditchdiggers and miners have it worse, but for sheer, numbing, endless (I do not, deliberately, say mindless) work, editing books is hard to beat.

And like all the better professions, editing is something of an art, too, if it's done well, and something of a mystery as well. Nobody teaches it, of course; you're born to it, the way a good surgeon is born with the right hands; it's something you either can or can't do, though apprenticeship doesn't hurt.

The first draft reveals the art; revision reveals the artist.

I confess... if I typo a Facebook post I will edit it. I know it's only Facebook but it's an editing sickness.

People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard because they don't read it... well, ok, go ahead. Write a bestseller. Don't forget to go through the correct edit process. We'll wait.

the past can never be literally true in memory: it must be continuously edited, and the question is only whether we take creative control of the editing or not.

He also cut another bit we liked—a character named Gravy Wallace who loved gravy. That was it—Gravy Wallace loved gravy. Maybe the showrunner was right and it was stupid. But maybe Gravy could've been the next Disco Stu.

Write your first draft with your heart. Rewrite with your head.

Every word you add dilutes the sentence.

We were editors of our own selves, revealing only what we wanted to show. Being only what served us best. Trust was an enormous act of faith. And faith… God , faith was hard.

I don't see why it matters what is written. Not when it's about people. It can always be crossed out.