Christine Leunens 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.

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

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.

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.

One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.

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.

I barely ever reread the chapter before posting, because I overthink things, and I feel like overediting or trying to use too many words can ruin the story.

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

As a writer, I know that - you write a first draft and then put it in a drawer. The longer I can put it in a drawer, the better off I am. So I structure my writing so that things can sit.

The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

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

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

I don't feel I write fast. I write in longhand and do so much revision. On the page, it's so old-fashioned. I could write a whole novel on scrap paper, scribbles and things. I keep looking at it and something develops. For me, using a word processor would mean staring at a screen for too many hours.

Oh how I wish I could be as obsessive as Carrie from 'Homeland' when I'm writing a book! That would save me a lot of trouble during the revision process.

Writing tips are like mini skirts. Sometimes they fit perfectly, sometimes they make you cry, and sometimes you can reuse the material and sew yourself a pillow or something.

Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite.

You become a great writer by writing.

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.

Work on good prose has three steps: a musical stage when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.