Writing Rewriting Quotes

My books are based on the "what if" principle. "What if you became invisible?" or "What if you did change into your mother for one day?" I then take it from there. Each book takes several months in the long process of writing, rewriting, writing, rewriting, and each has its own set of problems. The one thing I dislike about the writing process is the sometimes-loneliness of it all. Readers only get to see the glamour part of a bound book, not some of the agonizing moments one has while constructing it. ~ Mary Rodgers

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. ~ James A. Michener

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten. ~ Paul Engle

Good writing is essentially rewriting. ~ Roald Dahl

Interviews, research, more interviews, fact-checking, writing, rewriting - and then, in an instant, it is over, ~ Hanya Yanagihara

Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story. ~ Roberta Gellis

Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control. ~ Roger Ebert

Literature is one of the few kinds of writing in the world that does not tell you what to buy, want, see, be, or believe. It's more like conversation, raising new questions and moving you to answer them for yourself. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

I will only let you touch me
if your hands are so full of intention
that every brush of your palms
feels like you writing a novel on my skin. ~ Azra. T

but the attitude reading and writing
gives you ~ Thylias Moss

The major newspapers simply stopped writing about me, and my voice could no longer be heard on radio or television. ~ Galina Vishnevskaya

I think that poetry is an act of celebration, that anytime you're writing a poem, it means that you're celebrating something, even if it's a sad poem, if it's an angry poem, a political poem or anything at all. The fact that you're taking the time and energy to pick up this thing and hold it to the light, and say, "Let's take some time to consider this," means that you've deemed it worthy enough to spend time on - which, in my opinion, is celebrating. ~ Sarah Kay

People are defined by their relationships. Every single one is a thread in our mind that wraps neatly to make the nest of emotions we live in. Two of those threads- at the very core of my nest- had snapped and now I felt nothing. ~ Anoosha Lalani

Writing opens the door to imagination. ~ Joe Evener

I am probably afraid that some spectator will not understand my photography - therefore I proceed to make it really less understandable by writing defensibly about it. ~ Ansel Adams

The author relates that the word "OBSCENE" springs from the concept in Greek drama that certain actions would be performed outside the scene or off the stage. He clarifies that the Greeks did not shy away from shocking actions, but they knew that portraying them in the audience's view would drown out the emotional subtlety of the character development and ethical dilemmas. ~ Gene Edward Veith Jr.

With words, you can't pull your punches, but you can change the context. ~ Anthony T. Hincks

Don't write when you're angry and under deadline, with time to test it only on friends who know what you mean, not on strangers who don't. ~ Gloria Steinem

Bad movies and bad writing and easy cliches still manage to make us feel things toward each other. Part of me is disgusted by this. Part of me celebrates it. ~ Leslie Jamison

And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up. ~ Alice Walker

I think human beings exist in a social world. I write realistic fiction, and so it isn't that surprising that the social realities of their existence would be part of the story. ~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Without visions and written goals, what direction are we going to head? ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate. ~ Louis Auchincloss

In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways. ~ Peter Temple

Hear me now or regret it later: Everything you write must be read aloud. Once all the context items are in place, this is the final test for any written piece...Do not neglect your sense of hearing in the process of writing and reading. As a longtime teacher of English as a foreign language, I can tell you on good authority that you have been listening to the English language at least five or six years longer than you have been writing and reading. And, most probably, your ears also had eighteen or more years of familiarity with the language before you began to read or write with a writer's sensibility. For these reasons, your ears know when things sound okay, good, beautiful, strange, awkward, or just plain bad, before your eye can pick up on such things...Your written voice should burn with the fire of fervent prayer, soothe like a friend's voice during a late-night phone call, alure like a lover's whisper. You must, through your accessible, infinitely read-aloudable voice, make your audience into an insatiable reader of your words. ~ Jiro Adachi

Each day that I don't write I get more fragmented. ~ Erica Jong

The easy answer is that writing novels is a lot more fun than practicing law. ~ Jeffery Deaver

The size of your audience is more important than the size of your book ~ Bernard Kelvin Clive

If I had to write a book, I could not find anything in the world worth saying - as is indeed the case with many voluminous authors. ~ Dinah Maria Murlock Craik

Writing must always have intention because words have power. ~ Suheir Hammad

This is important to writing ... that is, it is important to my own writing. This ... is landscape! Mine. This dirt came from the prairie where I was a child. I played in it, dug in it, planted in it, and walked over it. It is where I began. And all my writing begins with a landscape such as this. A place. ~ Patricia MacLachlan

God writes spiritual Mysteries on our heart, where they wait silently for discovery. ~ Rumi

Come with me to the mountains. Every stone there tells a story. ~ Avijeet Das

The most important thing is writing songs that resonate and giving people a chance to listen to them. ~ Corey Smith

Every stink that fights the ventilator thinks it is Don Quixote. ~ Stanislaw Lem

He cut away the insignificant and incidental. Those bits were tossed
away from the juicy core pieces. He slid the excess tissue and tendons away and reorganized the good bits on his plate. Those pieces were translated into words and catchy phrases and assembled like a new life. ~ Jeffry R. Halverson

Teach your students real-world writing purposes, add a teacher who models his or her struggles with the writing process, throw in lots of real-world mentor texts for students to emulate, and give our kids the time necessary to enable them to stretch as writers. ~ Kelly Gallagher

Does rejection ever get any easier? Only if we decide not to invest emotion in the dismissal… ~ Martha Alderson

Your job isn't to find these ideas but to recognize them when they show up. ~ Stephen King

It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life. ~ Amy Tan

How I love to get a letter! I can think of nothing better Than perusing an epistolary item. But deep is my despondence, For I've found that correspondence Means that if you want to get 'em, You must write 'em! ~ Richard Armour

Everyone is free to write and say whatever he likes, without any restrictions. ~ Vladimir Lenin

Perhaps this is what Henry James meant when he talked about the "irresponsibility" of characters. Characters are irresponsible, art is irresponsible when compared to life, because it is first and foremost important that a character be real, and as readers or watchers we tend to applaud any effort made towards the construction of that reality. We do not, of course, indulge actual people in the world this way at all. In real life, the fact that something seems real to someone is not enough to interest us, or to convince us that that reality is interesting. But the self-reality of fictional characters is deeply engrossing, which is why villains are lovable in literature in ways that they are not in life. ~ James Wood