Margaret Haddix Quotes

After my husband spell-checks one of my manuscripts, my editor says, 'It's been Normanized.'

If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns.

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

I became a connoisseur of that nasty thud a manuscript makes when it comes through the letter box.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.

Once I start writing, I am a huge reviser. To me writing is revising. I probably turn over every sentence that I write, to see if I have the rhythm right. That's why my first drafts take a really long time.

I take editing seriously. It's a joy to edit. I always hand a manuscript to several editors and can't wait to get back their notes and see what they've said. I don't criticize myself for making blunders here and there, because it's just natural. You write in chunks, and you may not remember that that sentence you wrote yesterday had the same word repeated three times. I do enjoy that. I love the feeling of repairing. Repairing is really nice.

YouTube is so quick and so instant, and you make a video, and you can upload it the same day, whereas with a book, you have to go through a lot of time and a lot of people and a lot of processes. So it was weird to sit down and work with other people on projects, because I'm so independent with YouTube.

I set the goal of getting a book contract by age thirty.

When you write a book for publication, you're writing it for other people to read.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

I started to send my work to journals when I was 26, which was just a question of when I got the courage up. They were mostly journals I had been reading for the previous six or seven years.

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

One of my graduate school professors, to whom I started sending poems when I started writing again after a 10-year hiatus, suggested I prepare a book manuscript which he could send to publishers for me.

Would you care to publish this? Sincerely, Robert B. Parker.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

It's funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.

Teaching regularly has made me an even more adept reader, I think. The kind of teaching I do is more like editing than anything else. The kind of editing book editors used to do before lunch. The kind of editing I used to do as a radio documentary maker.

Everybody needs an editor.

I'm a big advocate of revisions, of living with something for a month and then realizing what needs changing, what was lazy, what could be better.

I have been writing since I was a kid and thought what I wrote down could one day be made into a book.

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.

The best advice on writing was given to me by my first editor, Michael Korda, of Simon and Schuster, while writing my first book. 'Finish your first draft and then we'll talk,' he said. It took me a long time to realize how good the advice was. Even if you write it wrong, write and finish your first draft. Only then, when you have a flawed whole, do you know what you have to fix.