Quotes About Writing Drafts

#1. What is so inspiring about [Louis] Brandeis's writing is he saw it as a tool for democratic education. He would say things like the opinion is now convincing, now can we make it more instructive, after he'd gone through ten drafts.

Jeffrey Rosen

#2. First drafts don't have to be perfect. They just have to be written.

Anonymous

#3. With writing, there are multiple drafts. On stage, there is one take. I do a lot of preparation for shows, so, for the most part, what you hear me say is pretty much what I wanted to get at.

Henry Rollins

#4. When a director writes, there's a compulsory arbitration. You have a right to challenge any of the arbitrators, but they pick three of four arbitrators who read all the drafts with no names attached and then allocate credit.

Harold Ramis

#5. By the time I wrote those first three songs for his new CD ... I wanted to push the poetics as hard as I could push them, and not decide the songs were finished until I committed them to whatever the recording format was. I went through drafts right up until I recorded every single one of them ...

Steve Earle

#6. I don't have a schedule, but I can write for hours non-stop. If I'm drafting a book, I try and do a chapter a day. I dislike first drafts. Revision is a lot more fun, but it takes years.

Sefi Atta

#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. My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.

Chuck Palahniuk

#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. It's my belief that you should never show your work to anyone in the publishing world until it shines like a diamond. Rough drafts don't shine, as a rule. Mine certainly didn't. That's why I was rejected for years and years.

Patrick Rothfuss

#11. For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous.
In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write
really, really shitty first drafts.

Anne Lamott

#12. A novel rough draft is like bread dough; you need to beat the crap out of it for it to rise.

Chris Baty

#13. When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.

Chevy Stevens

#14. I write on a laptop, so it's impossible to count drafts anymore.

Garrison Keillor

#15. I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous.

James Dickey

#16. 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

#17. Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum.

Vladimir Nabokov

#18. 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

#19. When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted.

Gunter Grass

#20. Hemingway once said "all first drafts are shit". At this point we're just writing for the trash can so don't be too judgmental, just get it out there and onto the screen.

Dan Howe

#21. Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial.

Pamela Erens

#22. I'm not conscious of my own themes as I write first drafts, no, and in fact, I work hard to stay in that unconscious space and not ask myself what the novel is about or what my metaphors might mean because then, I think, you're just dead in the water.

Laurie Foos

#23. By the time you write the last page you have done half the book. The other half tends to get done in about five weeks; I do several drafts, very, very furiously rewriting. I literally do more or less nothing else and I stick with it and go through it and I begin to hate it.

Terry Pratchett

#24. I'm still learning so much with every play I write. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts. I think you have to be ruthless.

Stephen Karam

#25. 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

#26. This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations, without the need to look at your words as if they were already printed and bound. The beginning is only a draft. Drafts are imperfect by definition.

Walter Mosley

#27. I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.

Carol Windley

#28. Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.

Anne Lamott

#29. I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand.

John Irving

#30. What I love about drafts is the experimental nature of them. The draft is what you know about writing a poem running up against what you don't know about the subject. If you're lucky, you get to surprise yourself.

Cornelius Eady

#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. Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.

Gurinder Chadha

#33. I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn't give up. Then I wrote one more book.

Beth Revis

#34. I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.

Ha Jin

#35. I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

James A. Michener

#36. Write what you feel like writing at first without worrying about how it sounds. That's what second drafts are for. Enjoy the first one!

B.A. Gabrielle

#37. When a book is in its final stages, I've just got to be home, looking at it seventeen hours a day, and that's fine. But all that initial creation of the early drafts, I'd just as soon write it on the road in any extreme place. That's sort of ideal.

Pam Houston

#38. 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

#39. All writing problems are psychological problems. Blocks usually stem from the fear of being judged. If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone.

Erica Jong

#40. All great stories began as shitty first drafts.
There are no exceptions to this.

M. Kirin

#41. One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#42. 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