Maxine Kumin Quotes

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

Seventy percent of what I write, I throw out. I can write very easily, but writing original things is the hard bit.

There are producers, like the late Geoffrey Perkins, who have truly great ideas that will fire up your synapses and show you that handing in your first draft is not the end of a horrible process, but the beginning of a beautiful one.

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

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

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

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.

I sit down and draw from my lyric book. I sit down and start looking through it and see if there is anything that strikes me that I've written.

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.

I write a chapter, then edit it and edit it and edit it and edit it. I don't think we mine creativity from within. It's bestowed from on high, from God.

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.

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I was just sitting on my bed in a dormitory room, and I started writing. The thing that was magic about it was that once you put down one word, you could cross it out. I figured that out right away. I put down 'mountain,' and then I'd go, 'No - 'valley.' That's better.'

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

I think I wrote 'The Trysting Place' in about three weeks. But it was inexperience that made me have to do that. I didn't feel good about the book all the time I was writing it. It felt a bit like wading through molasses.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

I can't believe there is a poet who hasn't eagerly put down a word one day, only to erase it the next day deciding it was sheer lunacy. It's part of the process of selection.

I actually started an adult book, worked on it for about two years, and then decided it just wasn't coming together for me, and thought I'll go back to children's books, and almost immediately I started 'Holes,' and it just seemed to take off on me.

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 was very committed to the process of composing, working at poems, putting things together and taking them apart like some kind of experimental filmmaker.