Marc Platt Quotes

I felt that some of my work was OK. If I could do it over, I'd do better.

With writing, we have second chances.

I love revisions...We can't go back and revise our lives, but being allowed to go back and revise what we have written comes closest.

Write. Write. Write. Learn how to revise. No story is perfect straight from the keyboard.

Instead of a dedicated room, my best trigger is the actual habit of reading over the texts from the day before. Marking. Changing. Fussing. This ritual amounts to a habit of trust. Trust that I can make it better. That if I keep trying, I will come closer to something true.

If you rewrite a paragraph fifty times and forty-nine of them are terrible, that's fine; you only need to get it right once.

Songwriting is like editing. You write down all this stuff - all this bad, stupid stuff - and then you have to get rid of everything except the very best.

If a teacher told me to revise, I thought that meant my writing was a broken-down car that needed to go to the repair shop. I felt insulted. I didn't realize the teacher was saying, 'Make it shine. It's worth it.' Now I see revision as a beautiful word of hope. It's a new vision of something. It means you don't have to be perfect the first time. What a relief!

Whatever it is, go back and do it again.

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

The whole joy of writing comes from the opportunity to go over it and make it good, one way or another.

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

Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.

If life had a second edition, how I would correct the proofs.

Most of my work consisted of crossing out. Crossing out was the secret of all good writing.

It's not hard to write poorly. But to write something good, it has to be revised.

Read over your compositions, and when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The thing I love about making movies is the peace of mind that I know I don't have to be perfect the first time. I can be perfect the second time or the third time.

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.

If i had to do it all over again? Why not, I would do it a little bit differently.

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting.

You can never correct your work well until you have forgotten it.

You have to be willing to throw [writing] stuff away and replace it.

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 have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.