Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Revising. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Revising Quotes And Sayings by 94 Authors including Margaret Mitchell,John Irving,Lailah Gifty Akita,Patricia Fuller,Edward Hirsch for you to enjoy and share.
I do not write with ease, nor am I ever pleased with anything I write. And so I rewrite.
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Make mistakes, necessary marks.
Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.
So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.
Writing fiction is: Imagination and structure first and foremost - then revision, revision, revision! Then, revision!
I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.
I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.
Correct what you can; learn from what you can't.
Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.
My sense of a poem - my notion of how you revise - is: you get yourself into a state where what you are intensely conscious of is not why you wrote it or how you wrote it, but what you wrote.
I have a hard time revising sentences, because I spend an inordinate amount of time on each sentence, and the sentence before it, and the sentence after it.
It's never too late - in fiction or in life - to revise.
When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.
People think that writing is writing, but actually writing is editing. Otherwise, you're just taking notes
If it sounds like writing, I rewrite.
Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.
The process of revision should be constant and endless
It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.
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.
Editing is the essence of writing!
When rewriting, move quickly. It's a little like cutting your own hair.
Revisit and revise, ace." -Eva
Editing is the very edge of your knowledge forced to grow
a test you can't cheat on.
The writer's life is a life of revisions.
And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.
I do a lot of revising on paper. Sometimes I think I should just write longhand - what I type reads very different once I print it out.
You've got to write badly. If you write badly at least you've got something to rewrite. If you're scared to write badly, then you've got nothing.
Her face was as red as her hair. "What are you doing," she cried.
Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. "Editing your paper." What did it look like he was doing?
"You're just cutting out stuff!"
"What do you think editing is?
Write. Edit. Repeat.
[Writing] is edit, edit, edit. It's almost like getting a boat ready to go to sea. You've still got a countless number of things left to fix, but you've just got to go, "O.K., everybody get on the boat. We're going, ready or not."
Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.
Rewriting is when writing really gets to be fun ... In baseball you only get three swings and you're out. In rewriting, you get almost as many swings as you want and you know, sooner or later, you'll hit the ball.
You should edit before and after editing.
If you don't listen to the question entirely, then
you are going to revise your answers frequently.
The form in which thoughts occur to a writer is rarely the same as the form in which they can be absorbed by a reader. The advice in this and other stylebooks is not so much on how to write as on how to revise.
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open.
Write what needs to be written.
Write from what you know into what you don't know.Write-- Grace Paley
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.
Through revision, I enter the realm of the unspeakable and find the words that have eluded me.
The process of re-writing and writing and re-writing means that you may have a brilliant phrase, but over time it distills and distorts and changes.
I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.
Writing for me is largely about rewriting.
When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.
The process of writing is a process of learning; and much has become clearer to me in the attempt to transform my original rough notes into what I hope is an intelligible presentation.
I probably have less revision than those who have that wonderful rush of story to tell - you know, I can't wait to tell you what happened the other day. It comes tumbling out and maybe then they go back and refine. I kind of envy that way of working, but I just have never done it.
Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way
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.
Don't rewrite unless you know what you're trying to do.
Great writing is always rewriting or revisionism, and is founded on a reading that clears space for the self.
My life is constant revision but it's not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.
I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.
[Writing is] largely a matter of application and hard work, or writing and rewriting endlessly until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me that usually means many, many revisions.
Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.
In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.
Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.
I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs.
Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.
I'm the one who still needs rewriting. Don't we all?
Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.
The editing of a good piece of writing is like the editing of one's life: never quite complete; rendering all, ultimately, unfinished works when we perish from this earth.
Good writing is rewriting.
Rereading parts of your novel while writing is like doubling back at rerunning parts of a marathon midrace.
Half my life is an act of revision.
But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth - that the first draft is more creative and everything after that is ruining creativity.
There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.
Good writing is essentially rewriting.
You write to help yourself think better, then think to help yourself write better.
Sometimes you don't just want to risk making mistakes; you actually want to make them - if only to give you something clear and detailed to fix.
I don't tend to redraft, I will try to tidy it up, but basically I feel what I write down first has got the impetus, it may be clumsy, it may be repetitive, but a good editor can take that out. That first writing bit is the best thing you will do.
Don't get discouraged because there's a lot of mechanical work to writing. I rewrote the first part of Farewell to Arms at least fifty times.
I do a lot of rewriting. It's very painful.
I have always had a hard time revising my work as a journalist, which was never much of a problem. You always have editors as backstops. Their job is to perfect your story. Most of them want to be useful.
Writers who learn to leave holes in manuscripts to be filled later master valuable skills in writing: they learn to proceed amid ambiguity and uncertainty
if you may edit, edit yourself
You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.
One good thing the teaching has given me is the ability to read and revise my own work.
Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I've rewritten it.
I rewrite a great deal. I'm always fiddling, always changing something. I'll write a few words - then I'll change them. I add. I subtract. I work and fiddle and keep working and fiddling, and I only stop at the deadline.
Edit until your fingers bleed, then take a few deep breaths and edit some more...
No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.
Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath.
Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity ... edit one more time!
Don't tear up the page and start over again when you write a bad line-try to write your way out of it. Make mistakes and plunge on. Writing is a means of discovery, always.
On the Writing Process:
When in doubt, take it out.,
Yes, in my books I do edit myself to keep from becoming the Village Explainer.
Revision is not the end of the creative process, but a new beginning. It's a chance not just to clean up and edit, but to open up and discover. The energetic prose comes about from all the energy that went into crafting it, I suppose.
Stop writing what you know and start writing what you want to know.
I am inclined to think that as I grow older I will come to be infatuated with the art of revision, and there may come a time when I will dread giving up a novel at all.
Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down.
Don't write it right, just write it, and then make it right later.
Experience has two things to teach. The first is that we must correct a great deal and the second, that we must not correct too much.
From so much self-revising, I've destroyed myself. From so much self-thinking, I'm now my thoughts and not I
I place a lot of emphasis on process and revision because I believe that all of my students can become better writers through hard work.
I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.
There is no good writing; there is only good rewriting.
If you want to amend your errors, you must begin by amending your philosophy.