32 quotes found
“A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.”
“Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.”
“Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compr...”
“I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it.”
“I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.”
“I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.”
“How do you end a story thats not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation poi...”
“I'm writing a first draft and reminding myself that I'm simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.”
“If someone doesn't understand the importance of sensitivity readers, chances are they may need them the most...”
“Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.”
“Most often when I stammerThat's my brainCorrecting my grammer.”
“Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.”
“To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. Its definitely possible to write a book in a month, lea...”
“There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.”
“When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only ...”
“When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottl...”
“What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?--Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect.Accentuate everything that s...”
“No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.”
“Writing Tip:Don't let the "writing rules" bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story.”
“When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.”
