James Tate Quotes

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

If I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.

When I'm happiest writing is just not knowing where it goes and just let the characters bring you there.

I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.

I don't like re-writing very much. The fourth and the fifth draft - that's too much like work. There's not much inspiration about it, and the lawyerly side kicks in - being very careful and somewhat technical.

Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you're just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that's great. But that's not ordinary in a day's work.

I think about the sentence a long time, and then I write it. I don't revise it once it's set down.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

Definitely they write themselves. It's an amazing experience. It's like the characters have come alive and are sitting on my shoulder talking to me, telling me their tales.

I act as a sponge. I soak it up and squeeze it out in ink every two weeks.

I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

I'm truly, 100% guided by the characters and my Muse. If one of the characters suddenly decided to do something very different, I'd just go with it. It's much easier to let the Muse drive than for me to try to steer.

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.

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

I am always worried that over-planning and outlining will kill the magic of writing; most of the world I created in 'California' occurred via good old sexy sentence-making.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.