Antony Johnston Quotes

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

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

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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.

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

Writing is hard.

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

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.

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

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.

Writing a book is so much harder than I imagined.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.

I like revising much, much better than getting down a first draft. The first draft is just getting the pieces to the puzzle. Then I get to put the puzzle together!

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

My reputation for writing quickly and effortlessly notwithstanding, I am strongly in favor of intelligent, even fastidious revision, which is, or certainly should be, an art in itself.

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.

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.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.