Tim O'Brien Quotes

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

If you re-read your work, you can find on re-reading a great deal of repetition can be avoided by re-reading and editing.

Editing is more by-the-hip. You look at a text and ask yourself how it can be improved.

Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.

Rewriting to me means, if I work on it for three days, I've rewritten it.

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

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn't tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I've done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

I hate editing. I love to write, but I hate to reread my stuff. To revise.

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

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

Keeping the pen out of your hand as much as possible is the best way to write a song, in my estimation. But the pen must come in to tighten it up.

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

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

I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that closely resembles the sentence I first set down. I just find that I have to keep zapping and zapping the English language until it starts to behave in some way that vaguely matches my intentions.

Good writing is good writing, but that doesn't mean you can't orchestrate it or tweak it.

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

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft.

Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.