Nicholas Mosley Quotes

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

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

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.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

Every first draft sucks, so when you have your favorite novel, and you're like, 'Wow, this is a masterpiece,' and then you write your first draft, and you're like, 'This is really bad,' and then you're like 'I can't do this because this is nowhere close.' When, in reality, the book you loved so much started out just as crappy.

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.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

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

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, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

I'm not suggesting that the play is without fault; all of my plays are imperfect, I'm rather happy to say-it leaves me something to do.

Every time I start a new novel, it seems like an impossible undertaking. If I tried to do too much too quickly, I would get lost and feel overwhelmed. I have to go slow, and give things a chance to take form and grow.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

I'm glad I wrote them when I did because I think if I were to write my first novel now, it would be a different book, and it may not be the book that everybody wants to read. But if I were given a red pen now, and I went back... I'd take that thing apart.

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

I wrote about 22 plays before 'When You Cure Me,' which was staged in 2005. I occasionally get them out and have a read, thinking maybe there's a thought or an idea or even a turn of phrase that I could use for something new. There's not. They're dire.

I was a lot dumber when I was writing the novel. I felt like worse of a writer because I wrote many of the short stories in one sitting or over maybe three days, and they didn't change that much. There weren't many, many drafts. That made me feel semi-brilliant and part of a magical process. Writing the novel wasn't like that. I would come home every day from my office and say, "Well, I still really like the story, I just wish it was better written." At that point, I didn't realize I was writing a first draft. And the first draft was the hardest part.

If there is aught of good in the style, it is the result of ceaseless toil in rewriting. Everything comes out wrong with me at first; but when once objectified in a crude shape, I can torture and poke and scrape and pat it till it offends me no more.

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

Your first attempt will be terrible.... Remember that everything great you see started out as someone else's bad first draft..... Whenever someone sends me a manuscript and says, 'It just flowed out of me,' I usually think: Let it flow back into you for a while.

You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything. If I could, I'd completely rewrite Fargo Rock City, and every sentence would be just slightly different. In all likelihood, most of them wouldn't be any better. Some of them would just be changed back to whatever form they used to be, before I second-guessed myself the first time.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.