Adam Clymer Quotes

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I've rewritten it.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

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

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

I think the hardest thing to teach a student is that what he or she puts down on paper is changeable. It's not the final thing, it's the first thing, which may just be the suggestive, vague identification of something that you have to come back to and rewrite.

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.