Sean Connery Quotes

The first draft of anything is sh*t.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

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.

You can just start writing, but you're gonna go off on 10 or 12 starts and weird tangents, and yeah you'll have those pages to use later - to gift wrap some fish for your mother - but either way you're gonna have pages.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

The written word is the basic of everything. Most important, the idea, and after that, the dialogue. You can rehash the dialogue as you go along, it 's disgraceful to have to do this, but now and again you have no choice.

I don't do rewrites. I put all the pages in a pile next to the typewriter.

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.

It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all.

The first Chapter Law is, "Don't spend much time on it. You're going to have to rewrite it."

If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it-bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn't belong there.

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.

Usually, the way I write is to sit down at a typewriter after that year or so of what passes for thinking, and I write a first draft quite rapidly. Read it over. Make a few pencil corrections, where I think I've got the rhythms wrong in the speeches, for example, and then retype the whole thing. And in the retyping I discover that maybe one or two more speeches will come in. One or two more things will happen, but not much.

I’ve always said, ‘I have nothing to say, only to add.’ And it’s with each addition that the writing gets done. The first draft of anything is really just a track.

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

I can't understand how anyone can write without rewriting everything over and over again.

Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on.

Seventy percent of a first draft is garbage and 30 percent is gold, but you have to write 100 percent to get that 30.

I think the best advice I got was to not worry about what other people would think while you were working on your first draft. Focus on getting it out of your head. You can always edit the manuscript later.

I don't write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn't work, or what simply is not alive.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.

The only thing I might have noticed [and this is pretty anecdotal] is that there is some tendency to need to be taught that 'writing is rewriting' - maybe more of a sense than was pervasive 10 years ago that the first or second pass of a story is sufficient. That is an idea that is easily dislodged, but I suspect it might have something to do with the turnaround time re: blogging and so on - this sense that there is some essential truth about a first draft that one runs the risk of "ruining" by coming back to it.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

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