Terry Pratchett Quotes

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

I rewrote the ending of 'Farewell to Arms' 39 times before I was satisfied.

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

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

I always say when you write a book, you're a 'one-man band.' Whereas, when you finish a screenplay, it's just a sketch.

It depends on the book and what else is going on during my life, but it usually takes me about six months to write and revise the first draft.

'One With You' was the hardest book I have ever written. I rewrote it three times.

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

I wrote the first draft of 'Plan B' the summer after I turned 21.

I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

"The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes. I would do something and let it sit for three months... just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn't quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop writing Introductions and get on with the book.

Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly. Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think I've got the rhythms wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in. One or two more things will happen, but not much.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

A lot of times, when people send me books to read - new writers mostly - I find that the book is still in a draft stage and that before it can leave the writer's hands and head to a publisher, it needs about five more revisions. Some people don't want to do that.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

I am sure it has been done with less, but you should be prepared to write and throw away a million words of finished material. By finished, I mean completed, done, ready to submit, and written as well as you know how at the time you wrote it. You may be ashamed of it later, but that's another story.