Quotes About Revising

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

Good stories are not written, they are rewritten

It is a bad plan that admits of no modification.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading.

All writing is rewriting.

Having already worked in publishing for a number of years, I was not naive when I entered the submission fray. I knew I would have only one chance to submit my fiction to my agent, and that she would have only one chance to submit it to publishers. So I held on to it, revising and polishing obsessively over twenty-three drafts before I shared it with my agent.

If, by contrast, you think that uncovering your mistakes is one of the best ways to revise and improve your understanding of the world, then this is actually a highly optimistic insight.

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

I used to hate reading my old work, but now I'm rather fond of it. I quite like going through it in the hope of making it better.

Like dancers with choreography or actors with scripts, jazz singers could take material that was known, even loved, then risk interpreting and revising it. They could conceal even as they revealed themselves. Inflection, timing and tonality were their language, at least as much as words.

The monsoon came, six months of infinite rain. The towns I once knew were wiped clean, and everyone said it was God revising his poem.

rethinking their "agreement.

Hawthorne, like most of my professors at Wheaton, was a committed evangelical Christian. But he was not afraid of asking questions of his faith. At the time, I took this as a sign of weakness (in fact, I thought I had nearly all the answers to the questions he asked); eventually I saw it as a real commitment to truth and as being willing to open oneself up to the possibility that one's views need to be revised in light of further knowledge and life experience.

When a difficult or worrying decision has to be reached, as soon as all the data are available give the matter your best thought and make your decision; having made the decision, do not revise it unless some new fact comes to your knowledge. Nothing is so exhausting as indecision, and nothing is so futile. A

Interpretation must itself be evaluated, within a historical view of human consciousness. In some cultural contexts, interpretation is a liberating act. It is a means of revising, of transvaluing, of escaping the dead past. In other cultural contexts, it is reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.

The voice of a person thinking, discovering, revising, is ever-present without any loss in grace or ease.

This was what was wonderful, standing alone in the big, soft night rewriting the past to make myself miss what had never been. Now that it was over, I could turn the past into anything I wanted. I could revise the empty space inside me so that it had a better shape: the outline of a happy childhood.

The reason my husband and I became Orthodox was that our mainline denomination was energetically revising its theology; church leaders were teaching that Jesus wasn't born of a virgin, he didn't do any miracles, and he didn't rise from the dead.†† After some reading, visiting churches, praying, and a whole lot of talking, we decided to join the Orthodox Church.

If you ask me, stopping to think, engaging in careful deliberation, and revising old thinking are rare and courageous actions. And they require dealing with a healthy dose of confusion. And that's uncomfortable.

I like the monologue even more than the duet, when it is good. It's like watching a man write a book expressly for you: he writes it, reads it aloud, acts it, revises it, savours it, enjoys it, enjoys your enjoyment of it, and then tears it up and throws it to the winds. It's a sublime performance, because while he's going through with it you are God for him — unless you happen to be an insensitive and impatient dolt. But in that case the kind of monologue I refer to never happens.

I guess the thing I would say most fervently is that your original impulse to write something is an impulse you should trust, and that if it doesn't work on the first draft, which it hardly ever does, the commitment to revising ought to be something you embrace really early. And to revise and revise and revise.

The rigors of creativity - the self-doubt, the revising, the solitude - do require a kind of self-consumption. It comes at a cost; a cost that isn't for everyone.

The idea of going back to school and revising for exams would be hellish. As an actor, my form of revising is learning scenes, but to start going through biology, chemistry, and all of those sciences would be just a nightmare.