#editing

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism. ↗

— Tiffany Madison

#editing #editing-humor #editors #joy #neurosis

Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love. ↗

— Stephanie Roberts

#fiction #fiction-writing #love

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

#humor #revision #writing #humor

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically: His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong. Her editor would cut that line. ↗

— Jaclyn Moriarty

#humor #romance-novel #writers #writers-block #humor

... The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book. ↗

— E.A. Bucchianeri

#books #creative-process #creativity #editing #editing-humor

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are. ↗

— Laura Kreitzer

#grammar #writing #ya #grammar

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress... Actually, when you think about it, not many novels in the Spare tradition are terribly cheerful. Jokes you can usually pluck out whole, by the roots, so if you're doing some heavy-duty prose-weeding, they're the first to go. And there's some stuff about the whole winnowing process I just don't get. Why does it always stop when the work in question has been reduced to sixty or seventy thousand words--entirely coincidentally, I'm sure, the minimum length for a publishable novel? I'm sure you could get it down to twenty or thirty if you tried hard enough. In fact, why stop at twenty or thirty? Why write at all? Why not just jot the plot and a couple of themes down on the back of an envelope and leave it at that? The truth is, there's nothing very utilitarian about fiction or its creation, and I suspect that people are desperate to make it sound manly, back-breaking labor because it's such a wussy thing to do in the first place. The obsession with austerity is an attempt to compensate, to make writing resemble a real job, like farming, or logging. (It's also why people who work in advertising put in twenty-hour days.) Go on, young writers--treat yourself to a joke, or an adverb! Spoil yourself! Readers won't mind! ↗

— Nick Hornby

#humor #work #writing #humor

Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side. ↗

— Eric T. Benoit

#humor #reviews #yoda #humor

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that's a good thing. ↗

— Katerina Stoykova Klemer

#editing #personal-growth #poetry #writing #change

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others. ↗

— Robert Louis Stevenson

#conflation #editing #exaggeration #francis-bacon #shakespeare