Quotes About Revision

I can't live with art: I'd spend too much time tweaking it.

You need not expect to get your book right the first time.

I spend a lot of time revising. I'm not somebody who can move slowly.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. -Mark Twain

The writing begins when you've finished. Only then do you know what you're trying to say.

Some have been tempted to revise Jesus' command to read, Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality.

Hans Christian Andersen: We co-write them. I just don't do any of the writing. I change the bits I don't like and then erase all the rest from history. I'm more like a German theatre director. Or, y'know, a German generally.

the integration of matrices is not a simple operation of adding together. It is a process of mutual interference and cross-fertilization, in the course of which both matrices are transformed in various ways and degrees. Hidden axioms, implied in the old codes, suddenly stand revealed and are subsequently dropped; the rules of the game are revised before they enter as sub-rules into the composite game. When Einstein bisociated energy and matter, both acquired a new look in the process.

Rahel's "list" was an attempt to order chaos. She revised it constantly, torn forever between love and duty. It was by no means a true gauge of her feelings.

no matter how careful we might be, no matter how much thought we might put in, a checklist has to be tested in the real world, which is inevitably more complicated than expected. First drafts always fall apart, he said, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently.

First drafts always fall apart, he said, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently

History existed to be retold, with more panache but not necessarily greater accuracy.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.

To write is human, to edit is divine.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story," he said. "When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising. [ The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest , May/June 2009)]

One rule of the road not directly stated elsewhere in this book: 'The editor is always right.' The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor's advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection.

I got a scribbled comment that changed the way I rewrote my fiction once and forever. Jotted below the machine-generated signature of the editor was this mot: "Not bad, but PUFFY. You need to revise for length. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.

I love revision. Where else can spilled milk be turned into ice cream?