Quotes About Revision

the cardinal labor of composition, which is excision…

There was a spectator in me who, even while I squirmed and obeyed, remained observant, note taking for some future revision.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

If someday I make a dictionary of definitions wanting single words to head them, a cherished entry will be To abridge, expand, or otherwise alter or cause to be altered for the sake of belated improvement, one's own writings in translation.

I guess that plan is up the window.

Nobody would ever miss an editor...

Remembering a narrative alters it.

Poets don't finish poems, they abandon them.

An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material—the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become.

You can't take it personally when something you have written sucks. Just delete it and write something else.

I started reading my manuscripts out loud, to hear what they sounded like. If the text flows with little effort, then I am satisfied, but if I keep stumbling and stuttering while I read, then I rewrite.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

But I had learned long ago not to argue with those who need to revise the past.

You don't get to be a good screenwriter unless you do 20, 30 drafts: fact.

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

You can't start a movie by having the attitude that the script is finished, because if you think the script is finished, your movie is finished before the first day of shooting.

I wrote 'Black Deutschland' very quickly one summer, probably because I had a lot of it in pieces and fragments sitting around over the years as false starts or notes.

So for me the approach has become to go into a story not really sure of what I want to say, try to find some little seed crystal of interest, a sentence or an image or an idea, and as much as possible divest myself of any deep ideas about it. And then by this process of revision, mysteriously it starts to accrete meanings as you go.

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.

I don't outline. I sit down to write, and I take the ride. If something starts to not feel right, I go back to the last place that felt like jazz to me.

I started on computers with 'Billy Bathgate,' a little orange screen with black letters. I thought it was really cool, but it actually slowed me up for a while because it's so easy to revise, I tended to stay on the same page. I've learned to discipline myself.

The first draft of 'Ex Machina' is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.

You can really shoot things you think might work on camera one way, then you can try it that way, and then if you think it could also work another way, you have that luxury of shooting a bunch of different steps, and then they can decide in editing what works the best.

historians are not often appreciated because their research tends to destroy myths. I