Content Refinement Quotes

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

If I focus solely on developing new material, then I can get a new 45 minute to an hour in about six months. Then I'll work on it and work on it and can make it killer within another six months or so.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.

Good writing is essentially rewriting.

Everybody needs an editor.

I write longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

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

Television is such an evolving medium. When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets fretful. After he pees in it, he likes the flavor better, so he buys it.

A very good editor is almost a collaborator.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

I have a problem with blogs - all the best writers benefit from edits.

Anyone can make an article longer; the skill is keeping it tight and lean.

Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.

People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

The draft that finally goes to my editor doesn't get into her hands until I have read it out loud innumerable times - sometimes into a tape recorder - to make sure that it sounds right.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

An editor's job is to take something great and make it good.

If I post something, and my audience doesn't really like it or if they have other suggestions on how to make it better, I can take that feedback and instantly apply it to the next video.

My experience as a writer is that you really do write seven and eight pages to find the paragraph you were after all along.