Quotes About Revision

My first book is called 'Carry the Three.' It's definitely in a drawer, and it's terrible. I never sent it to anybody. My wife read it, but nobody else.

I give my work to my wife first to read. Then, I try to find new people who haven't read my work before, to get a new perspective.

The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write a bad sentence on the computer, then it's very tempting to go back and fidget with it and spend another 20 minutes trying to make it into a good sentence.

I don't really revise. I tend to rewrite.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning

She liked her pieces to have something from every time of day in them — she didn't trust things written in the morning only — so she reread and rewrote painstakingly. No part of a day — its moods, its light — was allowed to dominate. She hung on to a piece for a year sometimes, revising at all hours, until the entirety of a day had registered there.

altered brands.

Hemingway said write first and then take out all the good stuff and what's left is story. (By "good stuff" Hemingway meant all the material that the author has fallen in love with—not everything that was proper for the story.)

We ought not to endeavor to revise history according to our latter day notions of what things ought to have been, or upon the theory that the past is simply a reflection of the present

The process of revision should be constant and endless

Every success story is a tale of constant adaption, revision and change.

People are rushed and inspired by the success of Indian writers, and are falling over themselves to write novels. Every Indian is writing a novel right now. No one wants to revise.

Do not give me more credit than I deserve, and you will never have to revise your first impression of me.

But when it comes to most skills, failure is the only way to become better at something. Knitting teaches you that. You may have to unwind all of your stitches and start anew. That doesn't mean you've wasted your time. You learn from every stitch, even those that don't amount to anything. All writers should be made to knit a hat before they start writing a novel. It would help with understanding the importance of revision, and that the process is what can bring you the most

When a draft looks terrible, I don't try to convince myself that it's actually good or even that someday it will be, only that it's my job to work on it whether it's good or not.

Nothing is settled; no truth finds general acceptance. What we do one year we undo the next, and do over again the year following. Our energy is wasted in, and our prosperity suffers from, experiments endlessly repeated.

If you want to properly tell a story, you have to be willing to write it a thousand ways. And then you must be brave enough to share it with others.

Finish the book. Finish the book, regardless of how bad it is. You can make it better in a rewrite.

In looking back on the novel, I can see a lot of things I would do differently now, but the truth of the matter is, rewriting old work does little more than dress it in new clothes, and sometimes you don't want that. You don't want to see some old guy out there in a speedo. Just doesn't look right. Also, something written with the energy of the moment and in its time makes it different than when you come back and coldly remodel it. It looses its original charm if it ever had any.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

My life is constant revision but it's not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.

Don't be too harsh to these poems until they're typed. I always think typescript lends some sort of certainty: at least, if the things are bad then, they appear to be bad with conviction.

History is the present. That's why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.