Quotes About Revision

I don't know about doing a sequel. I think you can retroactively damage a product by adding to it.

By the time I'm done with a project, it's taken so long that I usually don't even like it anymore. I only see the things I wish I'd done differently.

I look back on my work and I think, 'Oh, why didn't I do that differently?'

I don't believe in director's cuts where you make things longer. The coolest thing was when the Coen brothers did a director's cut of 'Blood Simple,' and they made it shorter.

I disagree with everything I used to say.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.

Doing the box set is one of those things where you get to rewrite your own history to some extent. We could take out some of the songs that we felt weren't as strong as some of the others, so you look better.

The ability of a television series to make adjustments is something you've got to take advantage of.

When you write something, at first you might feel very defensive and protective of every single thing, but after a while, you just see what works and what doesn't. Sometimes you do test screenings, and an audience tells you that, or sometimes you eventually just go, 'Let's cut the joke out.'

I read stories aloud at every stage. I listen to my writer friends when they kindly offer criticism. I listen to my husband when he tells me something doesn't seem right. I have my mother's boyfriend, Loring Janes, read to make sure I get everything right with the machines and guns.

Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.

his style. "Brighten it, brighten it, brighten it!" he once instructed his subeditor W. H. Wills, after reading an article that was insufficiently "Dickensian

I have fixed more sentences than most people have read in their lives.

The first draft of anything is shit. — ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity.

Write in the morning, revise in the afternoon, read at night, and spend the rest of your time exercising your diplomacy, stealth, and charm.

People forgot; it was in the nature of people to forget, to blur boundaries, to retell stories to come out the way they wanted them to come out, to remember things as how they ought to be instead of how they were.

Revising objectives is smart because it stops you throwing good money after bad.

I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be any good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

More often, a poem went through twenty or thirty drafts with amazing numbers of alterations

One great feature of modern society is the institutionalized respect we give to processes designed to destroy the past.