Nell Scovell Quotes

In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.

I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.

I have friends who are capable of writing a very rough draft and then going back and embroidering - they're sort of the cathedral builders of fiction. I never really know what I'm doing, and all my pleasure's on the level of the line.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

To write is to look for very particular, specific points of view on reality.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

Re-writing is different from writing. Original writing is very difficult.

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 I'm working on a poem, it's at the forefront of my mind; I'm working on it when I'm cooking dinner or stretched out on the sofa. But if I don't really have it by the 10th draft, I know it just isn't going to jell.

I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I try not to picture a reader when I'm writing. It's like trying to make a great table but not picturing anybody sitting at it.

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

Ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

Writing is like bricklaying; you put down one word after another. Sometimes the wall goes up straight and true and sometimes it doesn't and you have to push it down and start again, but you don't stop; it's your trade.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

Novel writing, like so many things in life, is an iterative process. You come at it again and again, working at it like you would a piece of pottery or a stone sculpture, chipping away the parts that don't make sense, smoothing over the rough edges.

Many times I have written something, and after it was published, I understood what I was saying.

There are producers, like the late Geoffrey Perkins, who have truly great ideas that will fire up your synapses and show you that handing in your first draft is not the end of a horrible process, but the beginning of a beautiful one.

Writing is like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate, in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain

The strength of the poetry as we enter into whatever it is we are entering into, will be determined by the clarity of the thinking we put into it.

I write dozens and dozens of pages more than I need, and then edit them down to size. It's more like sculpture than construction.

I do not rewrite unless I am absolutely sure that I can express the material better if I do rewrite it.