George Saunders Quotes

Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be.

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft and I'm nowhere near done.

I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

It's never perfect when I write it down the first time, or the second time, or the fifth time. But it always gets better as I go over it and over it.

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

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

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 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 revise a lot while I'm drafting, often going back to the beginning again and again to revise because I've changed massive things about the story. By the time I get to the end of a first draft, I've been through the beginning lots of times.

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.

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.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

If the story wasn't overly long, I'd type it out. And I'd carry it around with me for a week and jot notes on it, and then I'd throw it away and do another one.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

Particularly in my early days, I did very little rewriting.

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

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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.

The first draft is usually junk. You have to work on it seven to eight times.

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go.

I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.

It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't understand that they have merely begun, and that they may be merely beginning even in the second or third draft.

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.