Hunter Hayes Quotes

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

To be honest, I rewrote 'Wicked Nights' a number of times. I just wasn't happy with the end result.

I am usually protective of my work, not showing it to anyone until it has been redrafted and polished.

First drafts are never any good - at least, mine aren't.

It drives me crazy to do readings of my books, because if I read anything I've written in the past, I'd like to almost rewrite everything. If I could, I'd completely rewrite Fargo Rock City, and every sentence would be just slightly different. In all likelihood, most of them wouldn't be any better. Some of them would just be changed back to whatever form they used to be, before I second-guessed myself the first time.

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.

I edit as I write. I revise endlessly. I don't go forward until I know that what I've written is as good as I can make it.

Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it.

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 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.

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.

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

I write in a journal first, briefly. Then read something I've read many times before, for about half an hour, then rework what I wrote the day before.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

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.

There was always the consolation that if I didn't like what I wrote I could throw it away or burn 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.

I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.

I write slowly, and I write many, many drafts. I probably have to work as hard as anyone, and maybe harder, to finish a poem. I often write a poem over years, because it takes me a long time to figure out what to say and how best to say it.

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

I write slowly. I actually write quickly, but I throw out so much material.

I've never been a believer in the word-count thing. I write slowly and tinker with the words and the word order, and I throw a lot of stuff out.

When it comes to lyrics, I just write down a lot of things, and only a very tiny fraction of it, I think, is any good.

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.