Edgar Wright Quotes

I've always equated the writing process with editing, sort of like when I get through editing the movie, that's like my last draft of the screenplay.

Formula: Second Draft = First Draft minus 10%.

When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

The first two chapters of any first draft generally need to be cut.

I generally edit quite heavily. In general, there aren't many scenes that are sitting where they sat in the script in the final form.

Parts of you die with every decision you have to make. It becomes about making decisions between bad decisions and worse decisions.

With a computer, you make your changes on the screen and then you print out a clean copy. With a typewriter, you can't get a clean manuscript unless you start again from scratch. It's an incredibly tedious process.

If every editor turns you down, maybe you should take a second look at your text, however, just in case.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

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.

I never reread a text until I have finished the first draft. Otherwise it's too discouraging.

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.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

My writing is a process of rewriting, of going back and changing and filling in. in the rewriting process you discover what's going on, and you go back and bring it up to that point.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.

I hate going back over what I've written. It makes me feel physically sick.

It's like you might have some great scene that you love but for some reason - and you can't necessarily put your finger on it - the movie's not working or it seems slow or ponderous in some way, and even though it has your favorite scene in there, actually the favorite scene is the culprit. That's the painful thing about editing, is trying to locate those things that are holding the movie back and then having the guts to cut them. And it is painful to do it.

[Rewriting is] a whole other art form; it's about craftsmanship.

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!

I revise the manuscript till I can't read it any longer, then I get somebody to type it. Then I revise the typing. Then it's retyped again. Then there's a third typing, which is the final one. Nothing should then remain that offends the eye.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

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 always make mistakes and I always fix things up, as best I can, in the cutting room.