Francine Prose Quotes

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.

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

I won't rewrite on set, but I'll just trim the fat.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

For each detail I include, I throw dozens away. So I guess the first trick is to pick the right details, the most revealing details. Then I think one must simply write quick, clean, bright prose. For me, this means rewriting and rewriting: almost never adding, almost always cutting.

I cut up loads. I always want everything shorter, shorter, shorter.

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.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

Omit needless words.

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

Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.

Writing for me is cutting out the fat and getting to the meaning.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

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

My goal is to strip things down so that you need just the right amount of words or shape to convey what you need to convey. I like editing. I like it very tight.

Creativity has more to do with the elimination of the inessential than with inventing something new.

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.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

Good writing is good writing, but that doesn't mean you can't orchestrate it or tweak it.

Directing my own writing, I see that I talk way too much, and everything can happen much sooner, with much less said about it.

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

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

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.