Quotes About Rewriting

The biggest challenge for me has been in coping with my perfectionism. I have a stiflingly hard time moving forward in a project if it's not 'just right' all along the way. The trap I so easily fall into is rewriting and rewriting the same scenes over and over to make them perfect, instead of continuing on into the wild unknown of the story.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

There's a lot going on in the world that's very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we're dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

One aspect of soulful healing that is most challenging and therefore most fruitful is the need to release a part of your story that may be lying underneath and behind the illness. Healing requires a willingness to rewrite the story you tell yourself about what has happened in your life and why it's happened. There is often an emotional attachment to the pattern that doesn't allow for easy change.

Tudor historians were adept at rewriting history.

In looking back on the novel, I can see a lot of things I would do differently now, but the truth of the matter is, rewriting old work does little more than dress it in new clothes, and sometimes you don't want that. You don't want to see some old guy out there in a speedo. Just doesn't look right. Also, something written with the energy of the moment and in its time makes it different than when you come back and coldly remodel it. It looses its original charm if it ever had any.

Life is like a typographical error: we're constantly writing and rewriting things over each other.

We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.

I rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.

INTERVIEWER: Do you do much rewriting? Wiper: I forget which of the great sonneteers said: "One line in the fourteen comes from the ceiling; the others have to be adjusted around it." Well, likewise there are passages in every novel whosefirst writing is pretty much the last. But it's the joint and cement, between those spontaneouspassages, that take a great deal of rewriting.

elders.' " Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which was a software system

Quite often, I'll be sent a script for a movie. And I find that I like it, so I say I'll do it. But then they rewrite it for me. They make it quirky. Odd. I find that rather annoying. I call it Walkenising.

Directors sometimes have good ideas that I wished I'd had, not on rewriting but simply on staging.

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony.

Mom, when you write a novel you get to rewrite it, but when you live with someone for twenty years, that is the novel, and you can never write that novel with anyone again!

Where I thrive is with my hands on the keyboard or my pen on the paper. One of the things I get to do is I get to rewrite. I rewrite, and I work hard on my scripts. You can rewrite until you're 'perfect,' and that's something that's safe for me.

It was only his fifth offense, and this time he's killed someone.

Life is deep, but our current politics is shallow. The history of this country is like the stuff of great art and philosophy, while our current politics is more on the level of gossip magazines. It is shallow and tawdry, an unworthy vehicle for grappling with the meaning of what we are going through. We need to think more deeply if we're to create more powerfully. We need to focus on a broader understanding of the American story and commit ourselves to rewriting it.

I do a lot of rewriting. It's very painful.

Thoreau said that there are two kinds of writing: one reports the event; the other is the event itself. This is another version of show-don't-tell. One is at arm's length; the other is right in your face, in your heart, in your senses. When you read the event itself, you forget that you're reading — you're experiencing it. And we write and we rewrite to discover how to do this with every story.

AU investigated the Religious Right's most common examples of the "war on Christmas." Guess what? They're bogus! Two schools accused of banning red and green did no such thing. Another school was accused of rewriting "Silent Night." In reality, it was putting on an eighteen-year-old play that changes the words of familiar Christmas carols to fit the play's secular theme of homelessness.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

I think things just happen to people. That's healthier, I feel, than believing there's some grand scheme where your story is already inscribed in the Book of Life. Books get rewritten.