Writing Efficiency Quotes

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

I have made this letter longer than usual, only because I have not had the time to make it shorter.

Less really is more. It's a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they're talking about by going too far with description. I think you've got to keep it short, crisp and clean.

By writing quickly we are not brought to write well, but by writing well we are brought to write quickly.

Write quickly and you will never write well; write well, and you will soon write quickly.

If I had been asked to write 1,200 words for a newspaper tomorrow, on any subject, I would just do it rather than leave a white hole in the page. And I think it's a very healthy attitude to take to writing anything.

The actual writing time is a lot shorter than the thinking time.

When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.

Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.

The ideal time for writing a [television] script is four days, though sometimes it has to be two or three days depending on the deadline. If it's two days, sometimes there are things I see that don't work as well. If I have two weeks, the scripts get kind of flabby and lack the adrenaline that a sense of deadline fills you with.

I actually wrote the lyrics for 'Goodbye' in 10 minutes.

I am a writer who has a policy to allocate 90 percent of my time for research and the remaining 10 percent to write.

I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.

I used to say when I was younger, 'I'm exhausted; writers can only write for four hours a day and that's done.' Now I find, as I'm getting older and I'm more aware of time, I can actually write all day.

At the very end of a book I can manage to work for longer stretches, but mostly, making stuff up for three hours, that's enough. I can't do any more. At the end of the day I might tinker with my morning's work and maybe write some again. But I think three hours is fine.

I like to take writing retreats within a day's drive of home. Less travel time means more time for writing, which is the name of the game here.

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

It would probably take me an hour to two to write it down, get the feel of it, and that's with quite a few changes. It's not really a hard thing for me to do.

I write fast, because I have not the brains to write slow.

My writing day has grown shorter as I've aged, although it seems to produce the same number of pages.

Some of the best songs I've written, I've written in 10 minutes.

At high school, instead of the weekly essay, I would write a poem, and the teacher accepted that. The impulse was one of laziness, I'm certain. Poems were shorter than essays.

I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.

I plan less and less. It's a great benefit of writing lots, that you get good at holding long narratives in your head like a virtual space.