Janet Flanner Quotes

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

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.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Once I have the story in my head, I write it down. The illustrations usually come last.

I very rarely write anything before what I see what I'm writing for.

Art, whatever form it takes, requires hard work, craftsmanship and creativity. As a writer, I know my grammar, cadence, the music of prose, and the art of the narrative.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

Writing is hard. I mean, I sit there and work at it.

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

The writing process, it's too mysterious to try and describe.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

I was just sitting on my bed in a dormitory room, and I started writing. The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. I figured that out right away. I put down 'mountain,' and then I'd go, 'No - 'valley.' That's better.'

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

I like to have a title before I start writing.

Kids think you just sit down and start writing. I always tell them you never do that.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

There's nothing easy about writing. It's always difficult. It's always a struggle.

The miracle of turning inklings into thoughts and thoughts into words and words into metal and print and ink never palls for me.

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

Often as a writer, you get your first draft out, and then you look and think, 'Now, what have I got here.' You're really just throwing mud at the wall and then going, 'Oh, there's a pattern there.'

I try to write an essay every time I speak.

The writing process is the time where nothing's been set in stone. It's a blank slate, or a blank page.

I don't get a lot of writer's block, because it's all based on research. I just start looking through my notes, and I can write garbage for days - I mean, some of it ends up being good.