Economical Writing Quotes

I think I personally, as a writer, read differently knowing how tough it is to write, knowing how challenging it is to articulate it, to express clearly and economically and with focus and with purpose.

I think film writing, you're thinking in pictures, and stage writing, you're thinking in dialogue. In film writing, it's also, you only get so many words, so everything has to earn its place in a really economical way. I think for stage writing, you have more leeway.

Short stories are designed to deliver their impact in as few pages as possible. A tremendous amount is left out, and a good short story writer learns to include only the most essential information.

The more screenwriting you do, the more you become aware that particular scenes aren't going to end up in the movie because they're too expensive. That has perhaps changed the way I think about writing novels, actually, because now I write expensive scenes whenever I can.

Learn from cinema. Be economic with descriptions. Sort out the telling detail from the lifeless one. Write dialogue that people would actually speak.

It should cause no surprise that anyone so lazy as myself should be economical to the point of miserliness with everything he writes.

I never write "metropolis" for seven cents when I can write "city" and get paid the same.

I do try and keep my scripts quite economical.

For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what's superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It's satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.

I think I have always sort of cultivated a flowery writing style. I've always sort of over - written in every genre that I've attempted. I went to college and took a couple of writing classes and I remember my teachers were always incredibly encouraging. But it was inevitable to get the criticism: "Take it down a notch!" But the nice thing about screenwriting is that you don't really have to.

The rules that I adhere to are the rules of minimalism. And those rules kind of force writing to be more filmic... to have the immediacy and accessibility of film so that the reader really has to fill in a lot of the details.

There are writers who can express in as little as twenty pages what I occasionally need as many as two for.