Vanessa Diffenbaugh Quotes

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

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

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

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.

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

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 can work on a verse for a very long time before realising it's not any good and then, and only then, can I discard it.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

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

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.