Quotes About Revision

I feel like it's a really natural part of writing: You lose perspective, and you have to let it go sometimes in order to come back to it and see that it's pretty alright.

Brevity and conciseness are the parents of correction.

A good approach is to allow one dream per novel. Then, in the final revision, go back and get rid of that, too.

Both [Quine and Feyerabend] want to revise a version of positivism. Quine started with the Vienna Circle, and Feyerabend with the Copenhagen school of quantum mechanics. Both the Circle and the school have been called children of Ernst Mach; if so, the philosophies of Feyerabend and Quine must be his grandchildren.

The best and worst of writing is that it could always be better.

Oh, I've discarded a great many [poems]. And occasionally I've discarded and then resurrected. I would find a crumpled yellow ball of paper in the wastebasket, in the morning, and open it to see what the hell I'd been up to; and occasionally it was something that needed only a very slight change to be brought off, which I'd missed the day before.

I had this really great amazing thing happen where I almost finished the book and I really needed to come up with an ending and I decided to go back and re-read the book and see if I could come up with an ending.

Stiggins's Seven Practices of Assessment FOR Learning Where am I going? Provide a clear and understandable vision of the learning target. Use examples and models of strong and weak work. Where am I now? Offer regular descriptive feedback. Teach students to self-assess and set goals. How can I close the gap? Design lessons to focus on one aspect of quality at a time. Teach students focused revision. Engage students in self-reflection, and let them keep track of and share their learning.

Spend the afternoon with Miss H. looking over Bryan's school clothes, and compile a large list of what he requires, which will probably have to be ruthlessly revised on financial grounds. Present Miss H. with some outgrown shirts, shorts, and vests for her small brother, who is reported to be the same age as Bryan only (gratifyingly)not so big. (Query Why should one be inordinately pleased at evidence of immense size of offspring compared to other children?)

I like to come up with lots of different sounds. So the final version of a song might have been 10 completely different songs before we finally got it right.

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

When you make an animated film, you make it over and over and over. We almost do ten versions of the film.

With digital editing, I now can make many, many versions of a scene.

I wrote a play once called 'Lobby Hero,' which I thought turned out very well, but there's no final version of it. I published the one we produced, but there are seven other versions with different variations sitting in my desk at home.

At Pixar, we do a million versions of the movie, and every one of them goes through their awkward teenage phase where it's terrible and doesn't make sense, and we just keep working on it.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

When I write a script, I have all the old versions of the script on my laptop. They're saved as backups in case something goes horribly wrong.

I'm always intrigued by authors who say, 'This book took 17 drafts.' They're very clear about it. I couldn't possibly count the number of times... So many of these stories I worked on for a very long time and wrote them, set them aside, rewrote them, worked on something else - they were never far from reach; they informed each other.

Veteran' is an exercise in editing because there is a lot of moments I took out and some that almost didn't make it.

I think I regard any history in quotes, because just like science, we're constantly revising science, we're constantly revising history. There's no question that various victors throughout history have flat out lied about certain events or written themselves into things, and then you come along and you find out that this disproves that.

I think increasingly we want to read the history that wasn't written by the victors.

I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true.

Like, every couple of months you read, they rewrite, you come back in, they've animated more stuff - they usually videotape you while you're reading it - so they'll incorporate some gestures and some facial expressions into it.

Opinions are made to be changed - or how is truth to be got at?