Quotes About Revision

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

I've done that kind of stuff in records, where you start going back and you want to just redo everything, destroy everything, because you think it all sucks and you can do it better.

He kept repeating the story, adjusting it a touch each time, as if he were a tailor working on a jacket, taking in a bit of fabric here, letting out a seam there, then stepping back to consider what fit what best.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

You have to be somewhat ruthless with your work. You have to let things go. Even your favourite little part might not work in the end.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

Some people remaster their records six, seven times, remix it three, four times, spend a million hours, then they always go back and hear a demo of it and they'll say, 'Aw that sounds so much better than the final mix.'

For products with revision possibilities, there is no better source available than a company going out of business!

Writing is a piece of cake. Editing is a slab of liver.

No human being has sufficient foresight to build plans which need no alteration or change.

So knowledge grows by subtraction much more than by addition—given that what we know today might turn out to be wrong but what we know to be wrong cannot turn out to be right, at least not easily.

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories.

reality provides such forced revisions of beliefs at quite a high frequency. Many

someone may evolve and contradict earlier beliefs

and, although it was a less ambitious version than initially envisioned

Memory is more of a self-serving dynamic revision machine: you remember the last time you remembered the event and, without realizing it, change the story at every subsequent remembrance.

Something has worked in the past, until—well, it unexpectedly no longer does, and what we have learned from the past turns out to be at best irrelevant or false, at worst viciously misleading.

The instant passed so fast, and when that happens, it goes for good and all you have is a slow lifetime to speculate on revisions.

Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.

Always have an answer - even if you change your mind five minutes later.

In science the important thing is to modify and change one's ideas as science advances.

I think of workshopping as a way to read your own work through the eyes of others - a scene that you write gets refracted by those around you, and suddenly you have several different readings of it, each with a different momentum for how it might be retooled or reshaped.

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.