First Draft Writing Quotes

#1. The best way of writing sex scenes is to do the first draft, orgasm, and then start editing. You can be objective post-orgasm.

Christos Tsiolkas

#2. if you are satisfied with your first draft you are not writing, you are excreting

Jennifer Ross

#3. When I'm writing, I don't put faces on the characters. When I finish the first draft of the script, I start visualizing, and sometimes then I think about one actor.

Pedro Almodovar

#4. You write that first draft really to see how it's going to come out.

James A. Michener

#5. A really well-done first draft of a book bares your soul. The purpose of revision is so that everyone who reads the published version believes you were writing about theirs.

James A. Owen

#6. Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

Rose Tremain

#7. For writing a first draft requires from the writer a peculiar internal state which ordinary life does not induce.
... how to set yourself spinning?

Annie Dillard

#8. It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I can change seven.

Dorothy Parker

#9. My first draft is usually how I meant it, but my second and third drafts is how I want to be understood.

Selena Haskins

#10. Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.

Ted Solotaroff

#11. Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.

Nicholas Sparks

#12. Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.

Joyce Carol Oates

#13. You write your first draft with your heart and you re-write with your head. The first key to writing is to write, not to think.

Sean Connery

#14. The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

George Carlin

#15. An unedited manuscript is a first draft of story; but is not a finished product. Too many writers study the craft of writing but do not acquire the skills of an editor.

Michael J. Kannengieser

#16. I write until the first draft is finished, and then I feel that I can get out. But, during the time of the writing of the first draft, I don't go out. I'm just locked away, writing. It's a time of meditation, of going into the story.

Isabel Allende

#17. I had this bad habit of not writing out a first draft and going back. For me it was the first sentence, then the second sentence, and I might be several weeks on the first page instead of writing a draft and trying to figure it out from there.

Donald Ray Pollock

#18. When a solid first draft of an original tale is complete ... you feel as if you could do anything.

Christy Hall

#19. The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

Terry Pratchett

#20. Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.
Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.

Maxine Hong Kingston

#21. Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

Angeline Trevena

#22. When I finish a first draft, it's always just as much of a mess as it's always been. I still make the same mistakes every time.

Michael Chabon

#23. I think longer that you sit on a screenplay the longer you sit. I'm a firm believer that you can write the magic out of a movie, out of a screenplay. I'm not saying that the first draft is always the best draft but a lot of times the magic is in the first couple of drafts. T

Todd Farmer

#24. I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and I know if I tried to write those books the way I wrote the stories it would take me years to finish.

Donald Ray Pollock

#25. There are a lot of people, who want to be writers, who stumble at a blank page. You could imagine an algorithm that could give writers a first draft or a starter kit, so it could enable people to be more prolific in their writing.

Philip M. Parker

#26. Writing the first draft is like hitting the beach on D Day. You don't stop to mourn the dead or comfort the wounded. You get off the beach because, if you don't, you'll die there.

Matt Hughes

#27. I'm sharpest early, and though I can rewrite any time, day or night, I'm useless after noon when it comes to writing first draft.

Hallie Ephron

#28. It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#29. The hardest part of writing is the first draft, and the closer you get to your deadline, the messier your workspace becomes - but that's the same with any creative outlet.

Tess Gerritsen

#30. Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat - chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.

Don Roff

#31. I've realized that with each novel I seem to set out a kind of puzzle for myself. And I am never sure in the process of writing a first draft how it's all going to turn out.

Laurie Foos

#32. For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie.

John Sayles

#33. The writing of the script is a continual process. There's the first draft and then many, many re-writes here and there.

Abdellatif Kechiche

#34. I've always said, 'I have nothing to say, only to add.' And it's with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

Gore Vidal

#35. Shirley Jackson said that a confused reader is an antagonistic reader, and I live by that. It's okay to start anywhere, and to let yourself write a big sloppy overly-detailed first draft. You just jump in, knowing that the water will be cold at first, but no one is making you swim.

Anne Lamott

#36. I write from the place of inquiry. The first draft is a discovery period to see what I know and what I don't know. My task is simply to follow the words. There are surprises along the way. I just have to get it down. Call it the sculptor's clay.

Terry Tempest Williams

#37. Unfortunately, most news writing is the product of a first draft culture.

Michael Gartner

#38. Writing, yeah. Me and my friend Scott Bloom just finished the first rough draft of a script. It's taken us three years to do, but we finally got a first draft. And we'll see whatever happens with that.

Ethan Suplee

#39. I write with a fountain pen. And then revise word by word and line by line so that the first draft of a scene is usually the tenth or so draft.

John Dufresne

#40. Whether I'm writing the script, or someone else writes the initial draft, I'm always an actor's director first. I always try to listen to them a lot and try to put their voices into their character.

Dito Montiel

#41. When I was writing my first draft, and feeling grandiose, I e-mailed an artist/clothing designer I know and suggested we collaborate on a fashion line inspired by the outfits my characters wore. I regret that we never did that.

Heidi Julavits

#42. Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

Laurell K. Hamilton

#43. I get ill when I'm writing because I'm so focused on it, and it can take a year or two. Often, I knock out the first draft very quickly. I can do it in five to six weeks. Then, it takes a year of rewriting it and rewriting it.

Eran Creevy

#44. I try not to think too much about an audience when I'm writing the first draft of a book - at that stage, the prospect of anyone reading what I've written would be enough to scare me into setting my laptop on fire.

Robin Wasserman

#45. Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.

William Faulkner

#46. The benefit of this kind of outlining is that you discover a story's flaws before you invest a lot of time writing the first draft, and it's almost impossible to get stuck at a difficult chapter, because you've already done the work to push through those kinds of blocks.

George Stephen

#47. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.

Jonathan Stroud

#48. I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it.

Barack Obama

#49. With my first book, I was hired to write a draft of the script. I was so young and less confident. They put me through seven or eight drafts and it was just getting worse and worse, and then the film was never made.

Emma Donoghue

#50. I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I've since learned to read utter crap while I'm writing: pulp is the thing.

John Niven

#51. I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.

Noah Hawley

#52. I've watched 'Ringu' probably three or four times before writing the first draft of 'The Ring.' And then I'd seen 'Ringu 2' I think once.

Ehren Kruger

#53. Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.

Guy Garvey

#54. First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.

Terry Pratchett

#55. The first draft is just a skeleton-just bare bones. It's like the very first rehearsal of a play, where the director moves the actors around mechanically to get a feel of the action.

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

#56. I think the first draft is so challenging because that elusive BALANCE is so challenging.

Darynda Jones

#57. I think I got spoiled and that writing a short story and getting it published, or writing a novel and getting it published, you pretty much get to do the first, second and third draft yourself without a whole lot of interference.

John Sayles

#58. When I'm writing the first draft, I'm writing in a very slovenly way: anything to get the outline of the story on paper.

Pat Barker

#59. A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts.

T. Davis Bunn

#60. I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

Robert Stone

#61. The first draft of anything is shit.

Ernest Hemingway,

#62. The first draft you're pretty much on your own, so I love that. I can let my imagination go wild. I just go crazy. Then, over the years - it takes years to write these things, to make these things come to pass - there are many, many, many drafts. For Maleficent, there were at least 15.

Linda Woolverton

#63. Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.

Richard North Patterson

#64. I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

Holly Black

#65. One of the greatest benefits of writing a truly awful, lousy, no good first draft is that it can only get better from there.

Martha Alderson

#66. I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

Susan Sontag

#67. Writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

Shannon Hale

#68. It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

Will Shetterly