Editing Quotes

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost... Most writers don't initially say what they want to say, or say it as well as they could. The newly hatched sentence almost always has something wrong with it. It's not clear. It's not logical. It's verbose. It's klunky. It's pretentious. It's boring. It's full of clutter. It's full of cliches. It lacks rhythm. It can be read in several different ways. It doesn't lead out of the previous sentence. It doesn't... The point is that clear writing is the result of a lot of tinkering.

William Zinsser

You must stop editing - or you'll never finish anything. Begin with a time-management decision that indicates when the editing is to be finished: the deadline from which you construct your revisionary agenda. Ask yourself, 'How much editing time is this project worth?' Then allow yourself that time. If it's a 1,000-word newspaper article, it's worth editing for an hour or two. Allow yourself no more. Do all the editing you want, but decide that the article will go out at the end of the allotted time, in the form it then possesses.

Kenneth Atchity

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

Zadie Smith

Let’s face it: The ‘genius’ stuff happens in the editing process. Most successful writers go through a tedious process of drafting and shaping their content to get something worth sharing. How do they do this? They write every day. They write a thousand terrible words to find a hundred words worth using. They share their work with a close friend. They edit, tweak, and then ship. But they have to have something to start with. And so do you.

Jeff Goins

The first draft is black and white. Editing gives the story color.

Emma Hill

Let the reader find that he cannot afford to omit any line of your writing because you have omitted every word that he can spare.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

An editor doesn’t just read, he reads well, and reading well is a creative, powerful act.

Susan Hill

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.

Shannon Hale

I find such delight in the purging effect of revision that I’ve become an editor.

Robert M Guion

You can always edit a bad page. You can’t edit a blank page.

Jodi Picoult

Editing is as much as an art form as writing a creative piece of literature. A good editor is a trusted person who instructs the writer to speak plainly and unabashedly informs the writer when they write absolute gibberish.

Kilroy J Oldster

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

T S Eliot

You write to communicate to the hearts and minds of others what’s burning inside you, and we edit to let the fire show through the smoke.

Arthur Plotnik

So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.

Dr Seuss

Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don't see them.

Elie Wiesel

When you write a story, you are telling yourself the story. When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are NOT the story...Your stuff starts out being just for you...but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right, as right as you can...it belongs to anyone who wants to read it, or criticise it.

Stephen King

Those who can read see twice as well.

Menander

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game.

William Zinsser

I'm all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.

Truman Capote