Quotes About Revising Writing

#1. 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

#2. When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

Stephen King

#3. I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.

Gail Carson Levine

#4. Rewrite and revise. Do not be afraid to seize what you have and cut it to ribbons ... Good writing means good revising.

William Strunk Jr.

#5. Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

Patricia Fuller

#6. The truth will set you free. Unless you're guilty.

Keith Ablow

#7. 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.

Matt De La Pena

#8. The best form of revenge is success

Peter James

#9. Nothing quite has reality for me till I write it all down
revising and embellishing as I go. I'm always waiting for things to be over so I can get home and commit them to paper.

Erica Jong

#10. If things are going well I can easily spend twelve hours a day writing, but not writing writing, just thinking and revising and taking a comma out and putting it back in.

Francine Prose

#11. There is really only one way to learn good writing: good reading and extensive writing and revising.

Robert Lane Greene

#12. Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.

Stephen King

#13. I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony.

Sherman Alexie

#14. I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good."--Leigh Bardugo

Leigh Bardugo

#15. I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Chaim Potok

#16. I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

Joyce Carol Oates

#17. Be abnormal; being normal is too predictable for your brand.

Bernard Kelvin Clive

#18. During the day, if I don't have any other commitments, I'm usually at my desk writing, revising, or researching anywhere from four to six hours.

Gail Tsukiyama

#19. You always end up with too much, so it's good to be part of the conversation about not just what you can omit, but how you are going to do the grammar of the omission, how you make things continue to work when there's something missing. It's your last chance to rewrite.

Tom Stoppard

#20. It is never too late to go quietly to our lakes, rivers, oceans, even our small streams, and say to the sea gulls, the great blue herons, the bald eagles, the salmon, that we are sorry.

Brenda Peterson

#21. Great men can't be ruled ... The great is the rare, the difficult, the exceptional.

Ayn Rand

#22. start something, with a knowledge to end it.

Krishna Sagar

#23. I listen to a lot of different stuff, from Mozart to Johnny Dowd to Monster Magnet. I don't listen to music while I'm writing a draft, but I do listen to it when I'm revising.

Donald Ray Pollock

#24. Paranoia
because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?

Jim Butcher

#25. Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

Margaret Haddix

#26. One of Cranmer's goals in writing and revising the Book of Common Prayer was to get Scripture into the ears of the people so that their hearts might be turned to God and their lives transformed by his love. Cranmer

Michael Jensen

#27. As I suspect is true of many who write for a living, as I write I think about all sorts of things. I don't necessarily write down what I'm thinking; it's just that as I write I think about things. As I write, I arrange my thoughts. And rewriting and revising takes my thinking down even deeper paths.

Haruki Murakami

#28. I enjoy writing plays most. I haven't written a radio play in a while and I don't write short stories anymore because the process of submitting them depressed me. I really enjoy revising novels, but drafting them can be a pain.

Sefi Atta

#29. Shine thy light.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#30. 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.

John Dos Passos

#31. First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea, to reform it ... Revision is one of the true pleasures of writing.

Bernard Malamud

#32. Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.

Don Roff

#33. Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.

Don Roff

#34. Numbers are free creations of the human mind; they serve as a means of apprehending more easily and more sharply the difference of things.

Richard Dedekind

#35. I personally am a 'discovery writer,' as we're termed, someone who plans the book by writing it and then revising the entire thing. When it comes to saga, this means writing large chunks of prose before any of it coalesces into a book.

Katharine Kerr

#36. I believe Jack Smith might have written THE BOOK on writing and revising for publication. Clean, direct, succinct
a book that is full of pure wisdom and truth, but also amazing technical advice.

Virgil Suarez

#37. Make friends when you can. You can't just do it when you need help.

Andy Lopata

#38. Practicality requires that we stop somewhere in the process, but nothing actually says we can't keep on writing and revising. In fact, most writers continue to develop ideas and themes from one book to the next in what is essentially a lifelong evolution and revision.

Ralph L. Wahlstrom