Michael Chabon Quotes

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

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, clichéd writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. It seems writer’s block is often a dislike of writing badly and waiting for writing better to happen.

The writing itself is no big deal. The editing, and even more than that, the self-doubt, is excruciatingly impossible.

Writing is not an amusing occupation. It is a combination of ditch-digging, mountain-climbing, treadmill and childbirth.

You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

I rail against writers who talk about the loneliness of it all — what do they want, a crowd looking over their typewriters? Or those who talk about having to stare at a blank page — do they want someone to write on it?

Your first attempt will be terrible.... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft..... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.

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.

There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

I know some very great writers, writers you love who write beautifully and have made a great deal of money, and not one of them sits down routinely feeling wildly enthusiastic and confident. Not one of them writes elegant first drafts. All right, one of them does, but we do not like her very much. We do not think that she has a rich inner life or that God likes her or can even stand her. (Although when I mentioned this to my priest friend Tom, he said that you can safely assume you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.)

Human beings were given a left foot and a right foot to make a mistake first to the left, then to the right, left again and repeat.

Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.

I do labor - it's part of the process. Writing is no easier today than it was in the beginning: writing well is very hard to do. Always.

Any kind of writing that's meaningful becomes hard work, so there were times when it would really flow, there were times when I'd get 10 pages a day, and then there were days when I would do three pages. Depends on the thickness of the material. If it's satisfying, it's hard, but it's pretty wonderful.

You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

When I have just sat down and tried to write the lyrics of a song, usually about half of it sounds like bullshit. I just have to go away from something and come back to it again later. I do a lot of editing and switching around and putting little pieces together to get the right mood and personality, and it takes me forever to get a song finished.

The trick is not becoming a writer. The trick is staying a writer.

It's hard work, writing, you know. Honestly, a fight every day against your own limitations. You have to squeeze books out of your brain, you're constantly trying to solve challenges. I think most writers enjoy the feeling of having written something, rather than the process of writing it.

When you are a writer the assist-to-turnover ratio...there are a lot more turnovers than assists. It's just the nature of the beast.

Writing's a lot like cooking. Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.

Okay, this is Fran Lebowitz. She gave an interview once for the Paris Review about trying to write fiction and saying that fiction writers start talking about how characters are talking to them, and it's crazy, she's never had that. And I also thought, I'm never gonna be able to do this, because I didn't feel that for a really long time.

Hardest thing: creating something out of nothing - the first draft is torturous.