Editing Quotes

Further editing deepens a story.

~ A.d. Posey

What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

~ E.a. Bucchianeri

Isn't one of the first lessons of good elocution that there's nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can't, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing? Or that, in writing, there's nothing you can describe in any page-filling paragraph that can't be captured better in just a sentence or two? Perhaps even nothing in any sentence which cannot better be refined in a single, spot-on word? Does it not follow, then, that there's likely nothing one can say in any word - in saying anything at all - that, ultimately, isn't better left unsaid? (attrib: F.L. Vanderson)

~ Mort W. Lumsden

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

~ Ryan Lilly

So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts – written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus – that have been edited and selected out of hundreds of other documents, and bound together into one hotchpotch volume, under the orders of a political primate, Pope Damasus. And, you’re still content to condemn the living love I feel here and now, because of that dusty accident of bad editing? Why?

~ Cliff James

Writing Tip:Don't let the writing rules bog you down when you're writing the first draft; they don't matter when you're writing the story, only when you're editing the story.

~ Linda Westphal

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

~ Charles Bukowski

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 wont the game.

~ William Zinsser

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

~ Ana Claudia Antunes

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words.

~ Alessandra Torre

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

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There’s no page of prose in existence that its author can’t improve after it’s been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I’m amazed I ever struggled with them.Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?

~ Charles Finch

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

~ Susan Bell

If I’m asking what kind of ‘return’ I should be expecting on the sacrifices I’m making, I have in that question revealed the need to ‘return’ that question to wherever I found it and have the word ‘return’ edited out of it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

~ S. Kelley Harrell

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

~ Merilyn Simonds

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

~ Red Red Rover

When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

~ Richard B. Knight

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

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

~ Samuel S. Vaughan

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

~ Gina Mcknight

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...

~ R.d. Ronald

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

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

~ Stephen King

I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.

~ Libba Bray

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Market it with the persistence of a drug peddler.

~ Ashwin Sanghi

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

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests' worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development was laid on the wasteland of Midtown West like slabs of gold bullion.

~ Carolyn Jess-Cooke

There should be no crying in copyediting.

~ Carol Fisher Saller

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, build on to that which is already excellent.

~ Auliq Ice

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.

~ Naveed Saleh

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn't feel trustworthy. Sometimes it's a quote or incident that's too perfect —a feeling I always had when reading stories by Stephen Glass in the New Republic. Sometimes it's too many errors of fact, the overuse of anonymous sources, or signs that a reporter hasn't dealt fairly with people or evidence. And sometimes it's a combination of flaws that produces a ring of falsity, the whiff of a bad egg. There's no journalist who sets off my bullshit alarm like Ron Suskind.

~ Jacob Weisberg

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

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

~ Betsy Lerner

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

~ Constance Hale

It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm's editing and censoring many of the tales.

~ Jack Zipes

A lot of the music editing job is communication and working out what a director really wants the music to be.

~ Steven Price

I think the only reason people use PCs is because they have to. Mac is the most streamlined computer there is. I started using the Mac in college because I was doing editing, and they were the only computers we could use to do that.

~ Cary Fukunaga

Teen problem novels? I can go through them like a box of chocolates. And there are fantasy books out now that need a lot more editing. Fantasy got to be so popular that people began to think 'We don't need to be as diligent with the razor blade,' but they do.

~ Tamora Pierce