Holly Black Quotes

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.

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.

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.

The first draft is usually junk. You have to work on it seven to eight times.

I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go.

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.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.

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.

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

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

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don't do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I'll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I'll worry about untangling it later. I'm glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

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

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

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

I number my drafts, and by the time a book is done, I'll have 75 or 80 drafts of some sections.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

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 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.