Quotes About Revision

Editing is a conversation, not a monologue

Therapy can seem like revision of memory. It can seem like you're saving your life by destroying your story and writing a new one. It can seem like therapy won't get its goddamn grubby mitts off you.

Obama promised a return to competence and confidence and asked the nation to believe again that the government could do big things well. In the end, he got his big thing, a once-in-a-generation revision to the basic social compact, a commitment of health coverage to nearly all Americans. He has yet to prove he can do it well.

I love the idea that the editing room is the final time you write. You should still be creatively solving problems even at that point. It's not really until you're locked that you can call it quits.

When you look back on anything in life, hindsight being 20/20, some things you'd like to have done a little differently.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

Instead, it's a change in our response to the Question, and being true to the insight means being open to how it revises the whole.

To write is to rewrite, he kept reminding me. One writes for oneself, and one rewrites for others.

Se escribe para uno mismo y se reescribe para los demás.

One writes for oneself, and one rewrites for others.

We reshape the story even when we believe we are simply repeating it.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

Read over your existing business plan like you read the menu at your favorite restaurant.

You're at the mercy of the editors' hands.

I'm used to changing a lot of the dialogue. But if I feel like the script is working, I don't want to mess with it.

If you try to write 1,000 words a day, as I do, after 100 days you'll look up and have a book. It may be a mess, and you may have to revise it 50 times, but you can't revise it if you haven't written it.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.

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

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

the imagination works not so much through inspiration as through perseverance. One must slog through the false starts, spot the wrong words and hold out for the right ones, and above all, be vigilant about staying on the path of revision, no matter how uncomfortable or even painful the journey might become.

One changes, as a writer, fairly quickly; what you wrote six months or a year ago might not sound right anymore.

rewriting is where good papers emerge.

It is modeling revision—taking a rough draft and moving it to a better place—that is critical if our students are to sharpen their writing skills.