Quotes About Revision

Science, literature, and common sense tell us that the self is a fickle thing, subject to revision in real time, and that the chasm that exists between any two people exists inside each and every one of us.

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

Although I long to get away from the typewriter, if I think I can produce a better opening or a better closing to a chapter, I'll change and change round again until I'm satisfied.

You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.

Once you've finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it's consistent, what shape it really has. You can't tell that while you're working on it.

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

If a story isn't working, I'm simply unable to finish it. That's what usually tells me something is wrong.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

Your spouse, a sibling, a friend need to read your drafts. They have to be people unafraid to tell you what sucks. For early feedback, that's more important than professional editorial skill. Most people know what sucks.

Whoever won the war, would revise the history.

First, cut out all the wisdom, then cut out all the adjectives.

In composing, as a general rule, run your pen through every other word you have written; you have no idea what vigor it will give your style.

Something is wrong with a sentence when you can delete words and not sense the loss.

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!

Write. Start writing today. Start writing right now. Don't write it right, just write it –and then make it right later. Give yourself the mental freedom to enjoy the process, because the process of writing is a long one. Be wary of "writing rules" and advice. Do it your way.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

An artist painting a picture should have at his side a man with a club to hit him over the head when the picture is finished.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.

But this is how history is done now. People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.

We should not delude ourselves into thinking that our historical narratives, as commonly constructed, are anything more than retrofits.