Rebecca Stead Quotes

Good stories are not written. They are rewritten.

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

I didn't become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don't just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.

If somebody asked for the first draft of something I'd written, it'd probably be pretty close to whatever got published. I get enjoyment out of writing, but I get absolutely no enjoyment out of rewriting, so I don't do much of it. The more you work on something, certainly, the better it gets. But there's also a pretty clear law of diminishing returns.

Only when you have completed a novel, or a story, can you return to the beginning and revise or 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 do a lot of revising. Certain chapters six or seven times. Occasionally you can hit it right the first time. More often, you don't.

After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value.

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.

Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won't go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.

With 'Broken Harbour,' a third of the way through, I worked it out and had to go back and bloody rewrite.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

I have the foundation to write, and then I go back and do research, and some of that might influence the recrafting of certain scenes.

You have to write a lot. And you have to rewrite what you wrote a lot more.

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.

When I start to write, I see my stories as a kind of movie. For instance, I ask myself, "What kind of opening do I want for this book?"

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

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

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

I have seldom written a story, long or short, that I did not have to write and rewrite. There are single stories of mine that have taken me ten or twelve years to get written.

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.

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.