Jason Isbell Quotes

I always rewrite each day up to the point where I stopped. When it is all finished, naturally you go over it. You get another chance to correct and rewrite when someone else types it, and you see it clean in type. The last chance is in the proofs. You're grateful for these different chances.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

My self-editing process is intense.

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

I always read what I write out loud, and I did that long before any radio thing. My editor finds that unusual.

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

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.

It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

I very seldom read back into what I've written.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

Once you've finished typing and moving text around and everything else, you have to leave it alone for a while. You do that to see if it stands up, to see if all the loose edges have been trimmed, if it makes sense, if it's consistent, what shape it really has. You can't tell that while you're working on it.

In early draft it never satisfied me, and that was when it clicked into place and it went so well as a diary.

I'm really happy to have the chance to talk about the editing process. It's something that I think doesn't get the weight it deserves, especially with the rise of self-publishing.

When I read it, I don't wince, which is all I ever ask for a book I write.

In 'Dark Skye,' I rewrote every one of the Pandemonia scenes over and over before I was happy with them - hundreds of pages are now sitting in a folder called 'Cuttings,' never to be read. Ouch!

I spent the entire morning inserting a comma; I spent the whole afternoon removing it again.

Everybody needs an editor.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

Although no one loves a typo, it's close to impossible to eradicate every single little mistake in a manuscript.

What helps change bad writing into mediocre writing is editing. Editing is in bad shape in print journalism, and is in virtually nonexistent shape in online journalism.