#editing

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

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

In the editing room, 20 percent of the time you're using stuff from before the actor knew the camera was rolling or you're taking a line from somewhere else and putting it in his mouth. ↗

— Campbell Scott

#before #camera #editing #else #his

I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe? ↗

— Bridie Clark

#dreams #editing #fitzgerald #hemingway #wolfe

How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation point where a period would have sufficed? What if you kill something breathing and breathe life into something the author wanted to eliminate? How do you get inside the mind of a person who isn’t there? Fill the shoes of someone who will never again fill his own? ↗

— Shaila M. Abdullah

#manuscript #writing #life

I got to spend all of my time every day at work reading and editing papers about cutting-edge technical research and getting paid for it. Then I'd go home at night and turn what I learned into science fiction stories. ↗

— Kevin J. Anderson

#cutting-edge #day #editing #every #every day

When you are editing, the final master is Aristotle and his poetics. You might have a terrific episode, but if people are falling out because there are just too many elements in it, you have to begin to get rid of things. ↗

— Ken Burns

#because #begin #editing #elements #episode

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship. ↗

— George Wald

#editing #products #rather #than

It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author's script almost without query. The Canadian practice is just what you would expect--a middle-of-the-road course. We think the Americans edit too heavily and interfere with the author's rights. We think that the English publishers don't take enough editorial responsibility. Naturally, then, we consider our editing to be just about perfect. There's no doubt about it, we Canadians are a superior breed! (in a letter to author Margaret Laurence, dated May, 1960) ↗

— Jack McClelland

#editing #humor #letters #publishing #writing