Revising Quotes

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”
― Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“Writers often torture themselves trying to get the words right. Sometimes you must lower your expectations and just finish it.”
― Don Roff

“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.”
― Bernard Malamud

“When you're a kid and a teen, you're not in control of your circumstances. But the beautiful thing about growing up is that you get to create your own reality and your own family. That family might be a group of tight-knit friends, that family might be a spouse and children of your own. But ultimately, your childhood realities do not have to perpetuate themselves into adulthood, not if you don't let them. It for sure takes work.”
― Jarrett J. Krosoczka, Hey, Kiddo: How I Lost My Mother, Found My Father, and Dealt with Family Addiction

“Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully.”
― Ted Solotaroff

“When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime.”
― Don Roff

“Writing is an often-painful task that can feel like the death of one’s past. Equally discomfiting is seeing one’s present commitments to truths crumble once one begins to tap away at the keyboard or scar the page with ink. Writing demands a different sort of apprenticeship to ideas than does speaking. It beckons one to revisit over an extended, or at least delayed, period the same material and to revise what one thinks. Revision is reading again and again what one writes so that one can think again and again about what one wants to say and in turn determine if better and deeper things can be said.”
― Michael Eric Dyson

“The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the rods clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.”
― Paul J. Silvia, How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

“Even if you're in the thick of revising another work, write something new. Something small. It's important to keep telling yourself stories.”
― Don Roff

“Though now that I think about it, the workshop that day was probably focused on revision, as in Your First Draft Sucks and You Have a Thousand Do-Overs Before You Get It Right. Think of it this way: Build a city, then blow it up to save it. Invent a road to take you far out of town, then start over with one good brick.”
― Kim Addonizio, Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life