Quotes About Editing

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author

I felt lost without the Delete key, the scrollbar, the cut and paste functions, the Undo command. I had to do all my editing on-screen. In using the word processor, I had become something of a word processor myself.

Writing is rewriting... If you fall in love with the vision you want of your work and not your words, the rewriting will become easier.

Writers write to discover what they have to say bringing to consciousness what they already know. It is the same with speech: speak to discover what you want to say. Sculpt, correct, refine, and redirect your thoughts on the fly as you speak. Authentic speech includes lively editing as part of the process.

Learn to take criticism. Your first draft won't be perfect, and it's damaging to the book to think that it is. Every great book you've ever read has been rewritten a dozen times. This is the hardest think to learn (trust me), but very, very important.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden

But it isn't a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns.

knowing now that the job of writing was as much about removing words as adding them,

neoconservatives. In the process of editing these

What makes it is when you go over the whole piece each day from the start to where you go on from rewriting it really and then going on. Even then the actual writing is probably only about an hour and a half. Of course lots of times you can't write but nearly always you do. Each day you throw away what turned out to be shit in the stuff you did the day before.

Revising while you generate text is like drinking decaffeinated coffee in the early morning: noble idea, wrong time.

Obviously, we can't cut all prepositions, nor should we try. But keeping them to a minimum offers a quick route to clarity, simplicity, and brevity.

Most people start shaping and revising what they have written once they get one pretty good idea. "Yes that's it, now I've figured out what I want to say." That's terrible. You shouldn't start revising till you have more good stuff than you can use. (And it won't take long to get it if you make your early writing into a free brainstorming session.) That way you'll have to be critical and throw away genuinely good stuff just to trim your piece down to the right length.