Owen King Quotes

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

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

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.

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.

You can polish and iterate and double down on what the magic was. You can make a much better thing. A much cleaner thing, a much more solid thing. And that's what 'Borderlands 2' is to 'Borderlands.'

I'm always tweaking, always trying to make it better, constantly moving the levers and dials.

Few ideas work on the first try. Iteration is key to innovation.

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

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

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

When you're doing a TV show, it's not like you just shoot for six weeks and you're in an editing room with all of your footage. It's like a guitar or a car, you have to fine tune things. You stop doing what's not working, you work on what is working and you add things that do work.

Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.

The thing I love about making movies is the peace of mind that I know I don't have to be perfect the first time. I can be perfect the second time or the third time.

There are many, many things in my work that need redoing - never the structure.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

I just try to improve every series.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

There's always things you can refine and polish.

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.

I write a line and then I revise the line and then I write two lines and then I revise lines one and two and then I write one, two and three and I revise one and two and then I write seven and eight and then I see that should be line four and I continually work it over as I go.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

To do something right it must be done twice. The first time instructs the second.

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.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.