Editing Your Writing Quotes & Sayings

There is an underlying rhythm to all text. Sentences crashing fall like the waves of the sea, and work unconsciously on the reader. Punctuation is the music of language. As a conductor can influence the experience of the song by manipulating its rhythm, so can punctuation influence the reading experience, bring out the best (or worst) in a text. By controlling the speed of a text, punctuation dictates how it should be read. A delicate world of punctuation lives just beneath the surface of your work, like a world of microorganisms living in a pond. They are missed by the naked eye, but if you use a microscope you will find a exist, and that the pond is, in fact, teeming with life. This book will teach you to become sensitive to this habitat. The more you do, the greater the likelihood of your crafting a finer work in every respect. Conversely the more you turn a blind eye, the greater the likelihood of your creating a cacophonous text and of your being misread. — Noah Lukeman

In front of me 327 pages of the manuscript [Master and Margarita] (about 22 chapters). The most important remains - editing, and it's going to be hard. I will have to pay close attention to details. Maybe even re-write some things ... 'What's its future?' you ask? I don't know. Possibly, you will store the manuscript in one of the drawers, next to my 'killed' plays, and occasionally it will be in your thoughts. Then again, you don't know the future. My own judgement of the book is already made and I think it truly deserves being hidden away in the darkness of some chest.
[Bulgakov from Moscow to his wife on June 15 1938] — Mikhail Bulgakov

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979) — Jack McClelland

Edit your author as you would be edited. — Barbara Sjoholm

Writing is like making love, editing is like giving your great grandfather a sponge bath. — Midnight Taylor

Her face was as red as her hair. "What are you doing," she cried.
Devon put a question mark next to the sentence. "Editing your paper." What did it look like he was doing?
"You're just cutting out stuff!"
"What do you think editing is? — M.M. John

Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium; it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in the dark. — V.S. Watson

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything. — Angeline Trevena

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

The process of editing a piece of writing seems sometimes a lot like natural selection. Your efforts never really eliminate the mistakes. You just cause them to evolve into a sneakier, more robust breed. — John A. Ashley

Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader. — A.J. Flowers

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

Your job as an executive is to edit, not write. It's OK to write once in a while but if you do it often there's a fundamental problem with the team. Every time you do something ask if you're writing or editing and get in the mode of editing. — Jack Dorsey

Writing a novel is like pottery. Your initial draft of your story is like a lump of clay. Editing is like shaping that piece of clay into something interesting and beautiful. — Monika Pardon

The thing for someone just starting off [in writing] is to write. You need to have limber fingers, whether you write with your fingers or you type on your laptop, but you need to have a limber mind and you need to be able to write without judging what you've written, at least right away, and without editing right away. — Augusten Burroughs

Make sure your message is clear, yet that you are faithful to its complexity. — Michael Dirda

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear. — Patricia Fuller

You generally know when someone asks you to do something- am I more writing, or am I more editing? The editor is the best metaphor for your job. — Keith Rabois

Well, I would tell Danny. I'd probably edit for Josh. That is if there was
anything worth editing.
"Joshua Roberts, you had better get your butt on the move!" Danny
hollered as he walked down the stairs.
I was nervously waiting for them to leave as I pretended to watch TV in
the front room.
"We're going to be late."
"So the hair crisis is under control I see."
"A stray hair will never win between a bottle of gel and a gay man," he
declared with a smile. "Joshua!"
"I'm coming. I'm coming."
I heard his sandals click on the stairs and I waited to see if the mental
image matched the real one. To my non surprise it did. — Kaitlin Scott

Love how editing makes you more confident with your book ...but also makes you want to set it on fire at the same time. — Kira Hawke

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity ... edit one more time! — C.K. Webb

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

Well, you know, I've been in so many writing workshops, writing classes, and to the right of me and to the left of me, there's always somebody much more talented than I am. And what I figured out is they're not willing to go through the rejection, which is enormous, and then the compromise that comes with, you know, editing your work. And so I decided a long time ago that I didn't have to be 'talented'; I just had to be persistent, and that that was something I could control. The persistence. — Kate DiCamillo

Mostly writing requires massive dedication, a whole lot of time spent alone, way too much sitting, countless hours spent thinking hard, and unending and occasionally painful dedication to forming ideas and laboring over the production of sentences, paragraphs, scenes, dialogue, punctuation, and all the elements that go into writing a novel, a play, a screenplay, or a poem. When we're not writing, we're thinking, plotting, imagining, or editing, which can be far more tedious than cranking out first drafts.
--Fire Up Your Writing Brain — Susan Reynolds

You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better. — Courage Knight

... 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

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
(Casual Chance, 1964) — Colette

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings. — Stephen King

Writing
is therapeutic. It helps you cope with issues that seem gargantuan at the time.
The process of expressing yourself about a problem, editing your thoughts, and
writing some more can help you control issues that you face. — Guy Kawasaki

If you don't hate your darlings a little by the time they go to press, you haven't edited them enough. — S. Kelley Harrell

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

Often you must turn your stylus to erase, if you hope to write anything worth a second reading. — Horace

It is imperative that your work habits from school do not make their way into your book writing process. I am talking about the practice of typing the last words just before the deadline every time you would hand in an assignment, a paper, or even a thesis. Your book needs time to mature, and you must allow yourself the luxury of rewriting and editing until you are satisfied. — Gudjon Bergmann

Do not put statements in the negative form.
And don't start sentences with a conjunction.
If you reread your work, you will find on rereading that a
great deal of repetition can be avoided by rereading and editing.
Never use a long word when a diminutive one will do.
Unqualified superlatives are the worst of all.
De-accession euphemisms.
If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
Last, but not least, avoid cliches like the plague. — William Safire

If you treat editing like you're making an abridged version of your book, it can help determine what's vital vs what can be cut. — Kira Hawke