Quotes About Manuscript

this is the first part of this precious manuscript

And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?" She shakes her head. "Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second

The question of manuscript changes is very important for literary criticism, the psychology of creation and other aspects of the study of literature.

Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.

The difference is this: If you write a good book, it'll get published. If you have a great screenplay, there is no guarantee.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

We all have our notions of sport. If I'd wanted to make my living climbing mountains, I wouldn't have gone into publishing. Most of the time, you're sitting in a dark room reading a manuscript.

I write all over the house. Because I write in longhand, I can go anywhere I want... I have some notebooks here and there, and then I type it in and pull it out, and I do the revisions all over the place.

Anyone who's taken a lot of creative-writing classes, or taught creative writing, has learned to dread a certain kind of manuscript. It's long, for one thing. It has irritatingly small type; it's grammatically meticulous when it comes to everything but punctuation, for which it has developed its own system of Tolkienic elaboration.

No agent wants to see a book until he or she has decided whether to pursue the relationship.

After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.

I have a color-coded computer spreadsheet that divides things down to chapter fragments. Each character's point-of-view is a different color. The text of the manuscript is color-coded the same way. The last thing I do before submitting the manuscript is turn all those colors back to black.

He was the most widely travelled poet of the Renaissance; a man who lost an eye in Morocco, who was exiled to the East for a sword fight, who was destitute in Goa and shipwrecked in the Mekong Delta – he swam ashore clutching his manuscript above his head while his Chinese lover drowned.

Tears of disappointment would come in spite of myself, as I crept away to hide poor, crumpled manuscript in the depths of my trunk. Deep down under all the discouragement and rebuff, I knew I would arrive there someday.

his original manuscript of Cotton Comes to Harlem. Unfortunately, he left it behind on his return journey at the Athens

I found a 'lost' manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee's interest in magic. Of course, it wasn't really lost. It was there, in the catalog.

If you want to send a manuscript, send it to an agent. And send a letter first, asking permission. Launch it into the real world of cold-blooded commercial response, not into the fantasyland of wishful thinking, cowardice and surrender to Resistance.

We don't actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don't know exactly when it was written.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

These men were manuscript hunters, teachers, scribes, scholars, librarians, notaries, priests, and booksellers—bookworms who blew the dust off a thousand years of history and tried to imagine and to forge a different world: one of patriotic service, of friendship and loyalty, of refined pleasures, of wisdom and right conduct, of justice, heroism, and political freedom; a world in which a life in a better society could be lived in the fullest and most satisfying way possible.

Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

The first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up.

most recent novel is Blackjack, a near-future thriller, written as Lee Singer. She teaches writing online and does manuscript consulting. She has served as a judge in a number of fiction writing contests, including the NYC Midnight Flash Fiction writing competition. She lives in Petaluma