Top 100 Quotes About First Draft
#1. Hardly anything is as exciting or as diverse, as strong a confirmation of life and hope and the universe's urge towards creativity, as a lively compost heap or the first draft of a novel.
Margaret Simons
#2. I have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second.
Colm Toibin
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. I wrote the first draft of 'Madame Bovary' without studying the previous translations, although I gathered them and took the occasional peek.
Lydia Davis
#7. 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
#8. The first draft doesn't have to be perfect, but it does have to be written!
Heather Robinson
#9. When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.
Len Wein
#10. Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
Jonathan Stroud
#11. 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
#12. Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind.
William Faulkner
#13. To be a self rewritten from a lost first draft.
J.J. Abrams
#15. 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
#16. Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don't be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love.
Francesca Lia Block
#17. 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
#18. When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.
Scott Westerfeld
#19. Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.
Chevy Stevens
#20. They already knew that they would be telling people about the morning for a long time to come, maybe for the rest of their lives, and the taxi ride was the first attempt at a first draft of a story that would have to satisfy parents, siblings, children, and grandchildren.
Nick Hornby
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. Until recently, the question was 'Why can't a woman be more like a man?' It should have been changed to 'Why can't both sexes be more like the best parts of each other?' Instead, the pendulum swung to the 1960s feminist lapel button Adam Was a First Draft. True enough. So are we all.
Warren Farrell
#24. My first draft is the skeleton of the story. I have to go back over it from start to finish repeatedly, adding all the layers of meat to the bones until, eventually, it becomes a living, breathing thing.
Alisha Ashton
#25. To have someone like Clint Eastwood come along and shoot your first draft as written is just any screenwriter's dream. And Clint is very straightforward. If it's good enough to get his attention, it's good enough to produce.
J. Michael Straczynski
#26. The first draft is all about freedom, and if loyalty is in question, it is only my loyalty to the characters and situations on the page. All the worries about where the material may have sprung from or what so-and-so might think can be dealt with later.
Jill McCorkle
#27. Learn to take criticism. Your first draft won't be perfect, and it's damaging to the book to think that it is. Every great book you've ever read has been rewritten a dozen times. This is the hardest think to learn (trust me), but very, very important.
Patrick Ness
#28. I don't write a play from beginning to end. I don't write an outline. I write scenes and moments as they occur to me. And I still write on a typewriter. It's not all in ether. It's on pages. I sequence them in a way that tends to make sense. Then I write what's missing, and that's my first draft.
Richard Greenberg
#29. I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.
Lauren Groff
#30. I do a nice sloppy first draft like everybody else. And then just work at it and work at it and groom it. I get input from other people.
Diablo Cody
#31. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft.
Elliott Colla
#32. If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.
Kimberly Willis Holt
#33. Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.
Rebecca Stead
#34. 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
#35. But if you worry about other people as you write a first draft, you will not be able to free your unconscious mind to give up its treasures. It will be bound by the great dogs of your fear,
Pat Schneider
#36. Still, I believe the first draft of a book - even a long one - should take no more than three months, the length of a season.
Stephen King
#37. So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course, I discover all sorts of bigger and more substantial things.
Peter Carey
#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 certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years.
Poppy Z. Brite
#40. We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.
Gene Luen Yang
#41. Unfortunately, most news writing is the product of a first draft culture.
Michael Gartner
#42. Rewrite, rewrite, rewrite, don't be precious about your first draft, it's an architectural blueprint to a whole building, be your own worst critic, confront your weakness and remember it's a craft.
Tobsha Learner
#43. A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.
David Macinnis Gill
#44. The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises.
Jonathan Haidt
#45. 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
#46. I always write my first draft in longhand, in lined notebooks. I move around the house, sitting where I like, and watch the words spool out in front of me, actually taking a lot of pleasure in the way they look in my strange handwriting on the page.
Sue Miller
#47. In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
James Patterson
#48. All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas!
T.E. Lawrence
#49. I think I wrote the first draft of 'Nightmare on Elm Street' in '79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.
Wes Craven
#50. 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
#51. It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.
Will Shetterly
#52. In less than eighteen months, it prepared a first draft which it submitted to the General Assembly and which, at the end of one hundred sessions of elevated, often impassioned discussion, was adopted in the form of thirty articles on December 10, 1948.
Rene Cassin
#53. 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
#54. Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.
Matt Hughes
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.
John Dufresne
#58. In Hollywood, writers are considered only the first draft of human beings.
Frank Deford
#59. 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
#60. (about divorce): Sometimes you have to scrap your first draft and start over.
Danielle Ganek
#61. The first draft is your "vomit onto the keyboard" draft, wherein your task is to simply keep moving and outrun your doubts.
Sean Platt
#62. 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. 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
#65. 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
#66. Fundamentally a good author has his or her own sense of style. There is a natural, deep voice, and that voice is present from the first draft of a manuscript. When he or she elaborates on the initial manuscript, it continues to strengthen and simplify that natural, deep voice.
Kenzaburo Oe
#67. The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.
Ken Follett
#68. I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.
Tess Gerritsen
#69. The first two chapters of any first draft generally need to be cut.
Aprilynne Pike
#71. 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
#73. I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.
Nora Roberts
#74. Suzanne [Collins] was very involved in the development of the script. She wrote the first draft. She was very involved with Billy Ray, when he wrote his draft.
Nina Jacobson
#75. Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept.
Chris Wedge
#76. 'City of Bohane' has been optioned for film, and I've finished a first draft of the script.
Kevin Barry
#77. People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
Alain De Botton
#78. 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
#79. Journalism is the first draft of history
Phil Graham
#80. Yes, the first draft is the key. That's why I put so much energy, focus, and attention on the first draft, because I respect that first go at the story. If I don't have the key in that first draft, I invariably won't get it in subsequent drafts, though I can craft around it.
Caridad Svich
#81. 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
#82. I think the first draft is so challenging because that elusive BALANCE is so challenging.
Darynda Jones
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. I start every first draft with voice rather than theme or image or even character as such, so it isn't like I'm ever rubbing my hands, cackling, "The dad is really going to take it on the chin in this one!" Not in terms of any given story, and certainly not in terms of the collection as a whole.
Roy Kesey
#86. They're constants, aren't they?" ... "Books are. That's why we like them so much. They seem immutable. They're not, of course. Not from the author's first draft to the tenth printing, but they seem like it.
C.E. Murphy
#87. I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be.
Michael Showalter
#88. I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.
Nora Roberts
#89. Your first draft can and should look like a fucking warzone. That's okay. Don't sweat it, because you survived. Put differently, that first draft of yours has permission to suck. Go forth and care not.
Chuck Wendig
#90. I had finished the first draft of 'Life As We Knew It' before Katrina hit, and it was startling to see things I wrote about actually happening in the real world.
Susan Beth Pfeffer
#91. The experiment of the poem is mostly intuitive. I write the first draft, pulling in the various elements that interest me, in the hope that their being combined will lead to some kind of insight.
John Barton
#93. Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.
Bruce Boxleitner
#94. You know a shooter when you see it. At least the creative people do. If a picture isn't obvious in the first draft you're kind of screwed.
William Monahan
#95. There is no such thing as a publishable first draft.
William Targ
#96. Just start scribbling. The first draft is never your last draft. Nothing you write is by accident.
Guy Garvey
#97. It's important to put aside your internal editor and just get words down on the page when working on a first draft.
S.J. Scott
#98. The first draft is for YOU, the writer; the second and subsequent drafts are for the reader. Trying to do both things at once - figuring out what we want to say, while also fashioning it for another human being to read - is the cause of writer's block.
Karen Karbo
#99. I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.
Hannah Kent
#100. 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.
Philip Roth
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