Quotes About Revision

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

My general working style is to write everything first with pencil and paper, sitting beside a big wastebasket. Then I use Emacs to enter the text into my machine.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.

Sometimes it seems like there's more footnotes than text. This isn't something we're proud of, and over time we'd like to see our footnotes steadily shrink.

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

There has been so much recent talk of progress in the areas of curriculum innovation and textbook revision that few people outside the field of teaching understand how bad most of our elementary school materials still are.

One of the great things about history is that it sort of isn't a done deal - ever. The historical texts and the historical evidence that you use is always somehow giving you different answers because you're asking it different questions.

I think some of my previous stuff... I tend to be a bit lazy in songwriting, where I'll just keep the first thing that comes down, and I won't go back and revisit stuff.

The hardest thing on 'Palo Alto' was letting go because I kept working on it, trying to make it better.

Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

You know, usually with movies there are periods, dark areas, where I might not be getting what I wanted out of a theme. I'll have to go over and over it again.

As an improviser, my nature is to take a theme and constantly rework it.

There are three primal urges in human beings: food, sex, and rewriting some else's play.

Keeping the design good as it changes is called refactoring.

Even though your film is in the can, the real work begins after...

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons

But the biggest problem of map-making is not that we have to start from scratch, but that if our maps are to be accurate we have to continually revise them.

There would seem to be four stages in the composition of a story. First comes the germ of the story, then a period of more or less conscious meditation, then the first draft, and finally the revision, which may be simply 'pencil work' as John O'Hara calls it — that is, minor changes in wording — or may lead to writing several drafts and what amounts to a new work.

Edit your life frequently and ruthlessly. It's your masterpiece after all.

History is notoriously not about the past.

Years before, she had dreamed of writing stories as a way to escape. She could revise her life and become someone else. She could be somewhere else. In her imagination she could change everything, herself, her mother, her past. But the idea of revising her life also frightened her, as if by imagination alone she were condemning what she did not like about herself or others. Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.