Quotes About Revision

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

The picture of the software designer deriving his design in a rational, error-free way from a statement of requirements is quite unrealistic. No system has ever been developed in that way, and probably none ever will. Even the small program developments shown in textbooks and papers are unreal. They have been revised and polished until the author has shown us what he wishes he had done, not what actually did happen. — David Parnas Paul Clements

The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise.

Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself.

In this chapter I have tried to call your attention to many of the writerly habits that result in soggy prose: metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don'ts.

Rule Seventeen. Omit needless words! Omit needless words! Omit needless words!

If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

What I have set down in a moment of ardour I must then critically examine. Sometimes I must do myself violence before I can mercilessly erase things thought out with love.

Write like you're in love. Edit like you're in charge.

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

The past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been.

The best way to ensure that your writing is as good as you can make it is simply to consult your imagination and judgment as you write and take note of whether you are using an expression that has found its way into the stream simply because it's always there, swirling lifelessly in an eddy, where it was recently deposited by some other writer you have read.

The first draft of anything is shit.

Laat die teks koud word. Die ou advies wat Elizabeth aan haar skrywers gee. Laat die teks afkoel, kry afstand, bekyk dit dan weer.

No medical student relishes the idea of having to learn a subject over and over again.

20/20 hindsight only proves you know how to polish a rear view mirror

To me, 'director's cut' means that what was released before was somebody else's cut. That, to me, always implies that what was released wasn't what the director wanted.

Better a decent remake than a bad original, don't you think?

We remake 'Hamlet' all the time. That's sort of what we do, humans.

I don't watch my own past films: when I watch them, I find they don't work very well, because I have changed. If I continue to make films, in fact, it is because I always want to repair my films. My inner rhythm has changed; I have changed. I have changed my way to film.

I'm always glad to see somebody rethink something rather than reproduce something I did.

I think it's almost impossible to edit something to death. I think you can make things better almost indefinitely.

I improve on misquotation.