Robert Ben Garant Quotes

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.

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

When I write something, I constantly rewrite.

Keep your hands moving. Writing is rewriting.

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

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.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

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.

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

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.

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

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.

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.

Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

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.

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

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.

Every one of our films, when we start off, they suck... our job is to take it from something that sucks to something that doesn't suck. That's the hard part.

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

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 write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again.

You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by.

When you write - explode - fly apart - disintegrate! Then give time enough to think, cut, rework, and rewrite.

Of every four words I write, I strike out three.