Joyce Carol Oates Quotes

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.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Writing is rewriting what you have rewritten.

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.

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.

Rewriting is a large part of the whole job. And get rid of stuff that's not working. Just pare it down until it's a beautiful thing you can hand in, probably late, to your editor.

Writing is probably one-fifth coming up with the stuff, and four-fifths self-editing again and again and again.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

I write and rewrite and rewrite and write and like to turn in what I think is finished work.

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.

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.

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.

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

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.

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

After I finish writing a chapter, I'll print it out, cut it up into paragraphs, and cut away any transition sentences. Then I shuffle all the paragraphs and lay them out as they come. As I arrange and hold them next to each other, very quickly a natural structure for the chapter presents itself.

You should always go through the first draft of a book all at once, I think, to get the best results. You can take time off after the first draft and come back to it fresh.

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

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.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

The one thing you don't want to do is go off and keep rewriting. If something's not quite right, it's often about modulating what's already there.