Quotes About Revision

It's much easier to identify and fix problems in language and timing when you hear the words being read.

I forget who said it, but there's that saying: 'Films are never finished, they're abandoned.' There's always something you think you can improve on, but I don't think you should try. George Lucas started doing it, and didn't stop. You can tinker indefinitely, and it doesn't necessarily make it better.

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.

I sometimes like to tinker with poems that have failed, ones that I have sent aside. Even years afterward, I will revisit them if there is something about them that I cannot give up on.

'An Education' was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

I love drafting like I love eating ice cream or having sex; I love revising like I love doing logic puzzles; I love line-editing like I love perfectly organizing a bookshelf; I hate reviewing copyedits and the second round of proofreading because, by then, I'm getting pretty tired of my own words. They all have their own challenges, though.

Every single one of my books had its title changed almost as we were going to press, for all sorts of different reasons.

When you see 'editor' on a book, there are many permutations of what that title can mean.

I'd had 12 different job titles in publishing before I typed 'The End' at the bottom of a manuscript page. I thought the manuscript was in great shape; I was pretty proud of myself. Then I sent it to some publishing friends, and they tore it apart.

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

I tend to write some, then outline some, then delete some, then go back and rewrite some. I love revising and hate first drafts. I have to wear bedroom slippers. My current favorites come from the Zetter Hotel in London. They have little tobacco pipes on the toes.

The fastest way to revise a piece of work is to send it, late at night, to someone whose opinion you fear. Then rewrite it, praying you'll finish in time to send a new version by morning.

Yes, Ray Bradbury did write 25,000 words of Fahrenheit 451 in just a few days. But what's often not told about that amazing burst of productivity is that he later revised the book several times over the course of a year, expanding its length and heavily editing it, before it reached its final published form. In every legendary story of bursts of creativity there is a dance somewhere if you look carefully.

You must be true to yourself—however, if you have a dozen editors tell you that something is a cliché, trite, or overdone, it probably is, and you need to step back and take a look at your work.

Instead of writing it wrong six times and then writing it right, I think it wrong six times and then write it right the seventh time.

I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.

History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it.

The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

Strangely, I always have a lot of cut scenes. I keep writing shorter and shorter scripts, thinking that this time, I'll get all my scenes in.

Any time anyone makes a comic book into a movie, in some way, I think they have to kill the comic book.

I usually do about five cuts as a director. I haven't ever directed a film where I haven't made five passes through the movie, and that takes a long time.