Harlan Coben Quotes

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

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 for me is largely about rewriting.

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

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

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.

If I see a phrase that strikes me as ugly, I'll delete it. Or, if I find a way to say something a bit more freshly than it was expressed originally, I'll do it. Ultimately, you want to try to leave behind the best possible paragraph or sentence.

Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

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.

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.

Another thing that's quite different in writing a book as a practicing newspaperman is that if you look at what you've written the next morning and you think you didn't get it quite right, you can fix it.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.

Revision is the heart of writing. Every page I do is done over seven or eight times.