Jonathan Swift Quotes

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.

Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.