Barry Hannah Quotes

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

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.

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

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.

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.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

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

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

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.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

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

There's nothing more painful than writing.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing; it really is.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

The process of editing is what I enjoy most - putting the pieces together and making sense out of them.

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

The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

I keep going over a sentence. I nag it, gnaw it, pat and flatter it.

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

For me, titles are either a natural two-second experience or stressful enough to give you an ulcer. If they don't pop out perfect on the first try, they can be really hard to repair. Or, worse, if the author thinks they pop out perfect, but the publishing house does not agree, it's difficult to shift gears. And then? Then you go insane.

In working on a poem, I love to revise. Lots of younger poets don't enjoy this, but in the process of revision I discover things.