Piers Anthony Quotes

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

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.

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.

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

I wrote it three times - with a Thesaurus.

I write when the urge hits me, getting the words down as fast as I can type and then I step back from what I just wrote and start a dialectical process where I begin challenging my own writing.

Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer.

By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

Be prepared to fall out of love with your words. I'm still too verbose at times.

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

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.

With all editing, no matter how sensitive - and I've been very lucky here - I react sulkily at first, but then I settle down and get on with it, and a year later I have my book in my hand.

When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.

Writing itself does not know what it looks like while one is doing it, only when it's finished.

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.

I always rewrite the very beginning of a novel. I rewrite the beginning as I write the ending, so I may spend part of morning writing the ending, the last 100 pages approximately, and then part of the morning revising the beginning. So the style of the novel has a consistency.