Revision Quotes

“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
― Henry Green

“In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”
― William Faulkner

“Throw up into your typewriter every morning. Clean up every noon.”
― Raymond Chandler

“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.”
― Don Roff

“What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion--is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling. Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end. In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.”
― William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow

“That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.”
― Kelly Barnhill

“It was badly received by the generation to which it was first addressed, and the outpouring of angry nonsense to which it gave rise is sad to think upon. But the present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate—the necessity of revising their convictions. Let them, then, be charitable to us ancients; and if they behave no better than the men of my day to some new benefactor, let them recollect that, after all, our wrath did not come to much, and vented itself chiefly in the bad language of sanctimonious scolds. Let them as speedily perform a strategic right-about-face, and follow the truth wherever it leads.”
― Thomas Henry Huxley

“Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the sixteenth century a different version of the tale was in wide circulation among wizarding families. In the revised story, the Hopping Pot protects an innocent wizard from his torch-bearing, pitchfork-toting neighbours by chasing them away from the wizard's cottage, catching them and swallowing them whole.”
― J.K. Rowling, The Tales of Beedle the Bard

“The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising."

[The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest, May/June 2009)]”
― Stephen King

“We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alone or of mountains and rivers and deer and cats were left intact. Three albums rendered into a revised past. It was as if I'd been alone at birth, alone all my days, and would continue alone.”
― Haruki Murakami, A Wild Sheep Chase

“I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.”
― Libba Bray

“To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work.”
― Steve Almond

“I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.”
― Ha Jin

“Why aren’t the thinks I’m thinking getting thunk on the page any faster?!? (from Stop Lying: Writing Is Hard on ChristopherLehman.com)”
― Christopher Lehman

“I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good.”
― Leigh Bardugo

“Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of 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.”
― Rachel Carson

“Then based on her own recent experience, the Divine Presence had a cruelly perverse sense of humor and His Grand Plan needed drastic revision.”
― Judith McNaught, Every Breath You Take

“The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you're ready, pick it up and read it, as if you've never read it before. If there are things you aren't satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that's revision.”
― Neil Gaiman

“Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.”
― Douglas Wilson, Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life

“Nothing is ever so good that it can’t stand a little revision, and nothing is ever so impossible and broken down that a try at fixing it is out of the question.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: The Untold History of People Power

“Allen Ginsberg instructs: "First thought, best thought." Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse.

Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, "'First thought best thought' is not 'First word best word ' Ginsberg does rewrite. I'm sure he does.”
― Maxine Hong Kingston, To Be the Poet

“How, then, to proceed? My method is: I imagine a meter mounted in my forehead, with “P” on this side (“Positive”) and “N” on this side (“Negative”). I try to read what I’ve written uninflectedly, the way a first-time reader might (“without hope and without despair”). Where’s the needle? Accept the result without whining. Then edit, so as to move the needle into the “P” zone. Enact a repetitive, obsessive, iterative application of preference: watch the needle, adjust the prose, watch the needle, adjust the prose (rinse, lather, repeat), through (sometimes) hundreds of drafts. Like a cruise ship slowly turning, the story will start to alter course via those thousands of incremental adjustments.

The artist, in this model, is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?

The interesting thing, in my experience, is that the result of this laborious and slightly obsessive process is a story that is better than I am in “real life” – funnier, kinder, less full of crap, more empathetic, with a clearer sense of virtue, both wiser and more entertaining.

And what a pleasure that is; to be, on the page, less of a dope than usual.”
― George Saunders

“Believe in your vision with your own revision;
Believe in your view with your own review”
― P.S. Jagadeesh Kumar

“To rewrite history is a deliberate action perpetrated by those who are too driven by their fear and too captivated by their greed to acknowledge that the flaws in their agenda won't stand up to the truth of history. And to arrogantly declare that their revision of history is anything less is to have their own history systematically destroyed in a manner forever beyond revision.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“Lies leave me cold when discovered without revision.”
― Anthony T. Hincks

“Whatever is happening to Pique isn’t what I think is happening, whatever that may be. What happened to me wasn’t what anyone else thought was happening, and maybe not even what I thought was happening at the time. A popular misconception is that we can’t change the past–everyone is constantly changing their own past, recalling it, revising it. What really happened? A meaningless question. But one I keep trying to answer, knowing there is no answer.”
― Margaret Laurence, The Diviners

“So often, as writers, we keep pressing ourselves against a wall. We know we’re stuck. We know this direction isn’t working. But stubbornness and pride keep us pushing in the same direction. In backing away from our original plan, we must have faith that the essence is there, but some radical departure must take place.--Writer's Digest”
― Marina Budhos

“The fool believes that to redefine something in a more palatable manner means that it’s less likely to make you sick.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“The accumulated weight of untold centuries carried forward on the shoulders and in the stories of the hundreds of millions of people who lived those centuries is massive. And should any historical revisionist attempt to author an alternative version, their pen is certain to snap under such a weight. And ultimately, so will their reputation.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough