William T. Vollmann Quotes

I write the paragraph, then I'm crossing out, changing words, trying to improve it. When it seems more or less OK, then I type it up because sometimes it's almost illegible, and if I wait, I might not be able to read it the next day.

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

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

I'm constantly revising. Once the book is written and typed, I go through the entire draft again.

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

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.

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.

I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber.

I don't do much rewriting, because each paragraph is very carefully put together.

I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.

Everybody needs an editor.

Writing is the easy part. The 'getting it right' part is harder.

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.

I love having written. Sometimes I love writing. I love to revise. Revising is my favorite part of writing.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

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.

The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to be fleshed out. The rewrite is very satisfying.

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

I don't find writing easy. That is because I do take great care: I rewrite a lot. If anything is sort of clumsy and not possible to read aloud to oneself, which I think one should do... it doesn't work.

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.

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

One thing a lyricist must learn is not to fall in love with his own lines. Once you learn that, you can walk away from the lyric and look at it with a reasonable degree of objectivity.