Peter Straub Quotes

And the most important thing you can do is learn to edit yourself. And then go back and rewrite.

You might not write well every day, but you can always edit a bad page. You can't edit a blank page.

Just writing a lot doesn't necessarily make you a better writer. You have to hear yourself as a writer, and the best way to do that is to read your writing out loud.

You don't start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it's good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That's why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.

I should mention something that nobody ever thinks about, but proofreading takes a lot of time. After you write something, there are these proofs that keep coming, and there's this panicky feeling that 'This is me and I must make it better.'

And then the really awful thing is that at the end of the day after crying and experiencing things, then you look at what you've written and you're like, 'Hmm, there's half a page that's good here.' Then you throw out everything else.

I wrote a piece for the school literary magazine that now makes me think: 'My God in Heaven, this is just the worst drivel.'

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.

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.

Nothing you write, if you hope to be good, will ever come out as you first hoped.

There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.

I can always write. Sometimes, to be sure, what I write is crap, but it's words on the page and therefore it is something to work with.

It always strikes me how almost unbelievably bad are the early versions of my novels.

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.

I very seldom read back into what I've written.

And if you have great writing, it's really easy, but if it's not so great and you have to work a little harder, I could tell where the work needed to be done but comedy is just fun.

I think if you write for long enough, you eventually have a problem with everything, because you start figuring out where you could be doing better. But as far back as I can trace, I always wrote clear, grammatical prose.

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

I like editing. Generally, you work under the assumption that everything can be shorter. I like to see if I can reconstruct a sentence. I find that enjoyable work.

I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.

I love drafting like I love eating ice cream or having sex; I love revising like I love doing logic puzzles; I love line-editing like I love perfectly organizing a bookshelf; I hate reviewing copyedits and the second round of proofreading because, by then, I'm getting pretty tired of my own words. They all have their own challenges, though.

No time you spend writing will be wasted - even if you write something that's bad.

There are many ways to improve your writing. Here's the bad news: 1.They all require hard work. 2.There is no magic bullet.

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

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.