Quotes About Revision

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. Its like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

My advice to writers: thank goodness we can revise and adjust and tighten and rethink before going public with our words. Revision is our friend. Our best friend. I love revision.

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

All his life, Sherlock Holmes had believed that when one had eliminated the impossible, whatever remained —however improbable— must be the truth. Now he understood that when the impossible was too intractable to be eliminated, one had to revise one's opinion of the limits of the possible.

and on occasion I like to write in pencil, because I need to know that I can erase the words, even if I never do.

It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.

In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision.

I once caught him in the act of revising a short story that had just been published. "Why," I asked, "rewrite what's already in print?" He looked at me, vaguely; then said, "Well, obviously it's not finished.

Oh, my dear Vimes, history changes all the time. It is constantly being re-examined and re-evaluated, otherwise how would we be able to keep historians occupied? We can't possibly allow people with their sort of minds to walk around with time on their hands.

First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.

One aspect of appellate judging is we have to give reasons for all of our decisions. And when you sit down and try to write it out, sometimes you find that your first judgment wasn't the right one.

The first draft is usually junk. You have to work on it seven to eight times.

If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.

So many times I've done a CD, and then the week after I record it, I've got this new tagline that's killer. And it makes the whole bit better. It happens all the time. But that's just the process of comedy.

Doing something like 'Bushwick,' a lot of people need to agree that the piece is working with what's going on on the screen. So it's a lot of tweaks and re-works, just kinda moving pieces around and getting things to hit right.

There are two kinds of editors, those who correct your copy and those who say it's wonderful.

No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it

Now think of life in the same terms. Start over when you have to. Make a second draft. Or a third. Embrace the chance you have to do things over again in a different, better, wiser way.

A good game designer knows that clinging to a few early ideas about a project can cut off the potential for the work.

The more central the belief is to our thinking, the harder it is to give up. These core beliefs anchor our understanding. We use them to make sense of events, to inquire, and to arrive at judgments about other ideas. And so we are much more likely to explain away any anomalies rather than revise our beliefs in the face of them.

It takes a long time to write something that is easy to read.

Don't comment bad code—rewrite it.

The principle is this: When you write, you make a point not by subtracting as though you sharpened a pencil, but by adding. When you put one word after another, your statement should be more precise the more you add. If the result is otherwise, you have added the wrong thing, or you have added more than was needed. Erskine

Strunk and White do a great job of reminding us to avoid needless words, but they don't begin to consider all of the ways in which more words might actually be needed. My goal will be to explain why, in many cases, we need to add words to improve our writing, as Faulkner so frequently does, rather than trying to pare our writing down to some kind of telegraphic minimum, as is frequently the case with Hemingway.