Margaret Haddix Quotes

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

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

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

I write everything out in longhand in one fast go. And then I throw out the first few and start over again. By the end of the first draft, the whole thing's messy and disgusting and horrible, but you really understand the foundational stuff.

Writing is rewriting; rewriting is writing - from the first crossed-out word in the first sentence to the last word inserted above a caret, that most helpful handwritten stroke.

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.

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

I don't write a quick draft and then revise; instead, I work slowly page by page, revising and polishing.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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

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

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

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.

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!

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

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 write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

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

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 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.

Writing for me is largely about rewriting.

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.

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.