Bill Clegg Quotes

I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

Occasionally if I look back at something I've written I'll find one of those that I don't understand, but that's a bad thing - the unconscious has dealt me a bad hand.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

When I'm writing something, I try not to get analytical about it as I'm doing it, as I'm writing it.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

Usually I spend a long while working alone before letting anyone read what I've written.

Reading your own material aloud forces you to listen.

If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

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.

Sometimes I'll be writing something, and I say to myself, 'Okay, that's definitely DTB,' or, 'It's definitely Strapping.'

Write something and leave it aside so you've practically forgotten it as much as possible, a month or so, then come back and read it as if you're reading it for the first time.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

I might write four lines or I might write twenty. I subtract and I add until I really hit something I want to do. You don't always whittle down, sometimes you whittle up.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.

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.

You have to write a lot. And you have to rewrite what you wrote a lot more.

My own words, when I am at work on a story, I hear too as they go, in the same voice that I hear when I read in books. When I write and the sound of it comes back to my ears, then I act to make changes. I have always trusted this voice.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.