Quotes About Revision

The only reason for using another cut is to improve the scene.

If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.

The best reason for putting anything down on paper is that one may then change it.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it . . . Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.

Exhuming a few symbolic tidbits from the late poet Bert Meyers's works, lest we forget… 'To My Enemies' Maddened by you for whom the cash register, with its clerical bells, is a national church; you, whose instant smile cracks the earth at my feet... ___ 'Homecoming' My home was a watercolor I left in the rain ... ____ 'Signature' And my obsession's a line I can't revise.

No piece of writing is ever finished. It's just due.

It was not until I began to write a book called 'Light Years' that an editor really stepped in. The editor was Joe Fox at Random House, and he wound up editing a subsequent book.

I used to write my books at night when I was a freelancer with no children. I used to really work in huge spurts - I could turn around a revision in two weeks, I used to be able to write 10,000 words a day. It's like, 'Wow, what happened to that?' That's just gone.

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

We taped all this and then got it transcribed and picked the best lines or ideas or ways to take a scene. I've done that many times, and it can improve the script but also wreck a perfectly good scene.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

The waste basket is the writer's best friend.

As a story writer, you have work with sharp but relatively small tools, the picks of metaphor, the shovel blade of images, the trowel of point of view, and then you delicately lift and brush in the revision with love and care knowing that one slip, and you might damage an extremely delicate thing.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

Writers have to put up with this editor thing; it is ageless and eternal and wrong.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.

You can write ten versions of a scene, and then, on the day, discover that something in the original scene worked. It's hard on writers. Hard on actors, hard on editors, hard on me, hard on the producers, who require patience and confidence. But I can't get to the end without going through this process.

You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

An author writes a book, and that's the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.