Siegfried Lenz Quotes

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

If you get a sense that your writing isn't quite working, change it. Or cut it out. Don't just tell yourself it'll do, because it won't.

My self-editing process is intense.

Edits are very important to me - they're the way in which I work on everything.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

No book I publish will be perfect, but I need to feel I've taken it as far as I can.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.

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

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

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.

I revise obsessively. It's important to me to have a clean page.

Often something comes in from which you can see that the person is good, the book may not be perfect as it is, and the person doesn't want to do a re-write. That's something we do almost nothing of.

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

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

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

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

I never leave a sentence or a paragraph until I'm satisfied with it.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

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 fix things all the time. Every time I do a solo, I re-check it and correct things that don't hit the mark.