Octavia E. Butler Quotes

I rewrite my books many times before submitting them, and after my editor takes a look I wind up rewriting some more! It's a good thing I learned at an early age to keep on trying. Stick to it, and eventually you'll get there.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.

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.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

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, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

I like to tell students, 'I didn't burst on to the literary scene.' I'm never good at things at the beginning. I was terrible at the start. I need to work and work.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

Eventually the bad stuff I'm writing turns into better stuff. Other times, I've just walked away from what I was working on, and figured I'd have a better perspective when I came back to it.

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

The only reason you make a movie is not to make or set out to do a good or a bad movie, it's just to see what you learn for the next one.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

The more you style, the better you get. Don't give up. At a certain point, the magic happens.