Kelly Jones Quotes

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

But the longer I'm in the business, you see a lot of times these screenplays have been rewritten 5 times and you're not really offending an author.

On the one occasion where I did try writing a screenplay, I found the rewriting just unendurable.

I tell my students that with a 200-page novel, you are going to write 100 pages that don't make the final cut. See it as an opportunity, although it took me a while to enjoy that 'lost in the woods' feeling.

When I finally finished writing 'Sisters,' I started getting hired for lots of rewrites.

When I wrote 'High Stakes,' I followed the classical format. I wrote an outline first, then a first draft, then got feedback and rewrote and rewrote it. I'd never done that before.

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

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.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit. Sometimes the first draft will come out at 200 pages. I think and think and I go, "um this story is about the brother that appears on page 178." I go back and I rewrite.

I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.

I'm just after the best script I can get.

I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.

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.

Writing a script consumes so much of time.

Writer's block has probably existed since the invention of writing, but the term itself was first introduced into the academic literature in the nineteen-forties, by a psychiatrist named Edmund Bergler.

A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it. And then, there are notes and you change it, in the conventional studio system.

A movie is very different when you're writing the script and you're building a story compared to what the final product is.

The Indian film industry does not believe in investing financial resources in scripts.

It's not writing in the traditional sense, but I've always said that the writing process continues on the set and even into the editing room.

There were numerous times where, at the end of a week of working on a song, there was a part of it that we still weren't feeling, so we'd scrap the whole thing and start from scratch the next week.

Finally, I'm recognizing that rewrites aren't some cosmic punishment for childhood wrongs but the nature of the business.

I'd love to be involved in the process of adapting a book to a script, but that's simply not my job.

Studying writing to me means reading and also rewriting obsessively. That's the best way to learn.

The writing process is not just putting down one page after another-it's a lot of writing and then rewriting, restructuring the story, changing the way things come together.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.