Quotes About Revision

Usually a man in my life slows my work down, but it turns out two men give me fresh energy for the revision.

In revision, as a rough rule, if the beginning can be cut, cut it. And if any passage sticks out in some way, leaves the main trajectory, could possibly come out — take it out and see what the story looks like that way. Often a cut that seemed sure to leave a terrible hole joins up without a seam. It's as if the story, the work itself, has a shape it's trying to achieve, and will take that shape if you'll only clear away the verbiage.

Well, I don't ever leave out details, in that I don't come up with information or description which I don't then use. I only ever come up with what seems to me absolutely essential to make the story work. I'm not usually an overwriter. As I revise, it's usually a matter of adding in as much vivid details as seem necessary to make the story come clear without slowing down the momentum of the story.

I spend a lot of time loathing the sentences that I put down on the page. Once I'm past that phase, it doesn't really matter what the routine is (coffee shop, someone else's house, my dining room table), I'm pretty fast. I go back to the start of whatever I'm working on, every half hour or so, and revise my way back to where I left off. I have my headphones on, I'm checking email, I look at Twitter and Tumblr, and drink a lot of coffee. I need a lot of distraction to work.

Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing -- he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.

I think that many of my ideas are correct, but I'll bet you, before my death other discoveries will be made that will prompt me to alter various ideas I have about human evolution.

I've made so many changes to my records because of the way the audience has reacted at the various festivals I've played - I've taken tracks back into the studio, stripped them bare, and built them back up again to create something entirely different.

I don't pick up my work at all. If it's something that's still in progress and I have the chance to make some edits on the material or think about the order, little things like that, I'll keep those stories at hand and go through them. But once it exists as the book, it's locked away in a vault, and I kind of put it behind me.

I've always been a big fan of taking old songs and completely turning them on their head. Having no adherence to the fine tradition of the original version. Rearranging them and taking a different approach to them.

I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

If I could go back I might change Geronimo a bit. If I do, it will be made a longer version.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

We can't motivate them by deluging them with more terminology or someone else's bulleted lists. We can't motivate them to revise their writing by stapling a rubric or checklist to their paper. We can't motivate them by simply hanging some posters on the wall. We must facilitate writing behaviors.

Rehearsals become patterns of behavior more easily if you don't think but just move from one action to the next. The power of the rehearsal is that you have formatted your brain for a series of actions so that you don't have to think as you move from one action to the next. As you repeat the pattern, revising it for real life, you become what you want to be.

There are lots of people who rewrite their past and, what's more, believe it themselves. Now that is odd.

The stuff that comes easy takes the most rewriting. And the stuff that comes hard reads the easiest (Writing for the Soul, p. 194).

It was only by self-translating that I finally understood what Paul Valéry meant when he said that a work of art was never finished, only abandoned... The act of self-translation enables the author to restore a previously published work to its most vital and dynamic state—that of a work-in-progress—and to repair and recalibrate as needed.

When I finish a sentence, after much labor, it's finished. A certain point comes at which you can't do any more work on it because you know it will kill the sentence.

That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.

I can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

There is no urge so great as for one man to edit another man's work.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.