Narrative Refinement Quotes

When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

Fiction does not spring into the world fully grown, like Athena. It is the process of writing and rewriting that makes a fiction original, if not profound.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

A good story cannot be devised; it has to be distilled.

Once you figure out what's best for the story, take out the rest.

I've done TV, but never where you're given this much time to live with a character, to study the tone and hone it and repair stuff, to go back and watch old episodes and go, "Oh no, that's a misstep. That's a victory. I should do more of that, less of that."

I start drawing, and eventually the characters involve themselves in a situation. Then in the end, I go back and try to cut out most of the preachments.

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

I love seeing the light go on in aspiring writers' eyes when you point out ways to improve their prose or their story - when they get it.

There's some good films, there's some films that could be improved. So we keep trying until we get it right. That's the nature of storytelling, whether it's on paper or on film.

People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.

If you are writing children's books, you need to be a ruthless killer.

Truth might be stranger than fiction, but it needs a better editor.