Catherine Gaskin Quotes

I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

Revision has its own peculiar pleasures and its own peculiar frustrations. The ground rules are already established; the characters already exist. You don't have to bring the characters to life, but you do have to make them more convincing.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

I rewrote the ending to 'Farewell to Arms,' the last page of it, thirty-nine times before I was satisfied.

I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

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

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

I love drafting like I love eating ice cream or having sex; I love revising like I love doing logic puzzles; I love line-editing like I love perfectly organizing a bookshelf; I hate reviewing copyedits and the second round of proofreading because, by then, I'm getting pretty tired of my own words. They all have their own challenges, though.

I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.

I barely ever reread the chapter before posting, because I overthink things, and I feel like overediting or trying to use too many words can ruin the story.

When you're trying to force things in a script, it seems like it's getting somewhere, but it isn't real or interesting. All the bad material you've written becomes an albatross around your neck. So I really don't like writing a lot of bad stuff, I prefer to just keep narrowing it down to stuff I think is solid.

When you are a writer, the assist-to-turnover ratio... there are a lot more turnovers than assists.