Quotes About Revision

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.

For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts.

A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft—you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft—you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

You don't care about those first three pages; those you will throw out, those you needed to write to get to that fourth page, to get to that one long paragraph that was what you had in mind when you started, only you didn't know that, couldn't know that, until you got to it.

The first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up.

I always say that the way you write a novel is for the first 83 drafts you pretend that nobody is ever, ever going to read it.

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away.

You must demolish the work and start over. You can save some of the sentences, like bricks. It will be a miracle if you can save some of the paragraphs, no matter how excellent in themselves or hard-won. You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now. (Are you a woman, or a mouse?)

orr we find a typo in a book.

Once I read autobiography as what the writer thought about his or her life. Now I think, 'This is what they thought at that time'. An interim report - that is what an autobiography is.

I beat a story to within an inch of its life - that's when I know its done. Not before, not after.

Respect the way characters may change once they've got 50 pages of life in them. Revisit your plan at this stage and see whether certain things have to be altered to take account of these changes.

If only people could travel as easily as words. Wouldn't that be something? If only we could be so easily revised.

An attempt is already underway to revise history-to leave the impression that the former president had nothing to do with Watergate. But there is no doubt about his obstruction of justice after the Watergate break-in.

When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?

But my lord, when we addressed this issue a few years ago, didn't you argue the other side?" He said, "That's true, but when I get more evidence I sometimes change my mind. What do you do?

That sounds like more of your revisionist history.

History is written by the future, and therefore distorted at its start.

I was reading a lot of European history, and I thought Attila the Hun had gotten a bad rap.

It's rare that you cut out something that is really good. You screen all of it, and when the audience doesn't respond, you cut out whatever is holding the story down.

In rare instances you have to give up what you thought was a great scene.

When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.