draft refinement Quotes

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or rewrite.

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?'

The first two chapters of any first draft generally need to be cut.

I know that if I have been working on one paragraph and I have written it three times, it goes in the bin. Unless it comes straight out, it is wrong, it is awkward, it does not fit.

I like revising much, much better than getting down a first draft. The first draft is just getting the pieces to the puzzle. Then I get to put the puzzle together!

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.

One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is done forever.

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

Once a script is released that doesn't mean it's the final product. It's not set in stone.

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.

If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns.

In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it.

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

I do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

A lot of times, when people send me books to read - new writers mostly - I find that the book is still in a draft stage and that before it can leave the writer's hands and head to a publisher, it needs about five more revisions. Some people don't want to do that.