Robert A. Heinlein Quotes

The draft that finally goes to my editor doesn't get into her hands until I have read it out loud innumerable times - sometimes into a tape recorder - to make sure that it sounds right.

It's always the paragraphs I loved most, the ones I tenderly polished and re-read with pride, that my editor will suggest cutting.

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

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.

The urge to purge the material I come up with is, I guess, an ongoing process.

I'm not patient at all. I avoid writer's block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I've gotten to the next scene, I'll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.

Like all editors, I assume, I'm a reactor.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

Five people read my work before its ready for publication, and I solicit opinions from all of them: my wife, my agent, my editor, and my parents.

The only people who usually have input on my writing are my wife and my editor. I'm not in conversation with anyone except the people I report on and the people I work with.

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 longhand and I type and I rewrite on the typed pages.

So give yourself that chance to put together the 80, 90 pages of a draft and then read it very in a nice little ceremony, where you're comfortable, and you read it and make good notes on it, what you liked, what touched you, what moved you, what's a possible way, and then you go about on a rewrite.

I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words 'everybody needs an editor.

You had to get everything exactly right or the editors would give you hell.

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

I learned early on that it's heartbreaking to - there's the editor that comes in, and then they have to craft the movie together, and sometimes you give a whole performance that's just been cut up, and maybe it's better for it, absolutely, but you still have to deal with the loss of that.

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.

Editing feels almost like sculpting or a form of continuing the writing process.

There's this kind of incredibly mistaken idea that because it's so much cheaper to roll the camera than it used to be and it's so much easier to accumulate a ton of footage, that then you can just go shoot a ton of footage and the editor will make sense out of it. But if you don't have something deliberate made, you're not gonna save it in the editing room.

There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very well - but his editor would come and live with him for a month. And they would go through the manuscript together.

An editor should tell the author his writing is better than it is. Not a lot better, a little better.

Trust your imagination. Don't be afraid to fail. Write. Revise. Revise. Revise.

The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.

When I write new worlds, I work in layers, building and throwing out, and building anew.