Quotes About Revision

I'm always in search for perfection. If it's not perfect, I'm back to the drawing board.

I'm a perfectionist - I could rewrite forever.

I leave my editor to put the periods and commas in.

I never see songs as permanent. I'm always in a state of revising everything.

Good novels are not written, they are rewritten. Great novels are diamonds mined from layered rewrites.

Any plan is bad which is incapable of modification.

What makes us Reformed is how we understand Scripture, and this understanding is summarized in our confession. If we thought that our confession was not biblical, we would not use it, and if anyone can show that our confession is unbiblical, the church ought to revise it to bring it into conformity with Scripture.

I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.

Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.

Just writing a lot doesn't necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

Read every sentence you write out loud. If it sounds boring, kill it.

A lot of directors don't bother to go back and look at their films, but I do.

Sometimes a manuscript is like bread dough. You have to abuse it.

I change my mind every five minutes. I'm very brutal with my own process. I throw everything away very quickly, and then I have to go out and rummage through the rubbish in the middle of the night to try to find a bit I'd written a week ago.

You never have to change a book for budget.

Sometimes you'll write while listening to a piece of music and think it's great, but then you'll go back and read it without the music and go, 'This sucks.'

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

I suggest that the introductory courses in science, at all levels from grade school through college, be radically revised. Leave the fundamentals, the so-called basics, aside for a while, and concentrate the attention of all students on the things that are not known.

After I've sent my revised draft to my agent and editor, they suggest more improvement sand again, this revision phase can take anywhere from a few hours to a few months.

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.

One of your first tasks, then, is to ask yourself: why do I care about this? The answer will make you feel entitled to tell your own story—to accept that it is not only worthy of being written down but fit material for literature—something you want to revise and craft until it is beautiful.