Judy Blume Quotes

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

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 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.

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 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.

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

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.

You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.

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 work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

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

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

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.

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.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

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

Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

What about writing it first and rationalizing it afterwards?