Erin Morgenstern Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

I'm a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

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.

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

I try and get it right the first time. I may rewrite a sentence four or five times, but I rarely go back and kill a whole page and rewrite it.

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

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.

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.

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.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

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

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.