Margaret Haddix Quotes

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

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

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.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

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.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

So give yourself that chance to put together the 80, 90 pages of a draft and then read it very in a nice little ceremony, where you're comfortable, and you read it and make good notes on it, what you liked, what touched you, what moved you, what's a possible way, and then you go about on a rewrite.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

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.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

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.

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a six-draft writer, or whatever.

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

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

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

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.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

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 get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.