Best 420 quotes in «editing quotes» category

The process of editing a piece of writing seems sometimes a lot like natural selection. Your efforts never really eliminate the mistakes. You just cause them to evolve into a sneakier, more robust breed.

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

There should be no crying in copyediting.

The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)

There's no point in writing my kind of stuff, when they're printing that kind of stuff. So I gave up and started drinking.

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

When I was learning the anthologist’s trade many years ago, sitting at the knees—metaphorically speaking, at least—of veteran anthologists like Damon Knight and Robert Silverberg, I was taught that you should always save your strongest and best story for last.

When she got back from taking Cassie to school Fancy knew that she ought to be working on her wilderness romance. She had promised thirty thousand words to her editor by tomorrow, and she had only written eleven. Specifically: His rhinoceros smelled like a poppadom: sweaty, salty, strange and strong. Her editor would cut that line.

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry. Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so. For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There’s no page of prose in existence that its author can’t improve after it’s been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level – every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I’m amazed I ever struggled with them. Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling – you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?

We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won't waste their time arguing with the characters they create...It is almost always a waste of time and people tend to stare when you do!

What importance should be given to details, in developing a subject?-- Remorselessly sacrifice everything that does not contribute to clarity, verisimilitude, and effect. Accentuate everything that sets the main idea in relief, so that the impression be colourful, picturesque. It's sufficient that the rest be in its proper place, but in half-tone. That is what gives to style, as to painting, unity, perspective, and effect. - Constantin Georges Romain Héger, teacher to Charlotte Brontë

[Women's magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look more beautiful, ie less than their age...By now readers have no idea what a real woman’s 60 year old face looks like in print because it’s made to look 45. Worse, 60 year old readers look in the mirror and think they are too old, because they’re comparing themselves to some retouched face smiling back at them from a magazine.

Writers come in two principal categories -- those who are overtly insecure and those who are covertly insecure.

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

Writing is like shadow boxing. Editing is when the shadows fight back.

Write when drunk. Edit when sober. Market it with the persistence of a drug peddler.

You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

Writing well is more than mechanics, but it is not less.

After university, I got a job sub-editing and for years I was a literary editor.

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

A good deal of editing a manuscript looks like mechanical work, as if anyone with time on their hands and a magnifying glass could do it. But at a certain point, you need a strong interpretive conviction and, as you say, an "intangible" relationship to what you are doing.

All you're trying to do in an improvisation is get as much material as possible for the editing room.

Alfred Hitchcock talked about planning out his movies so meticulously that when he was actually shooting and editing, it was the most boring thing in the world. But drawing comics isn't like shooting a movie. You can shoot a movie in a few days and be done with it, but drawing a comic takes years and years... That's the biggest part of doing comics: You have to create stuff that makes you want to get out of bed every morning and get to work.

Artistry is important. Skill, hard work, rewriting, editing, and careful, careful craft: All of these are necessary. These are what separate the beginners from experienced artists.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole - so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

As a loyal believer in the Auteur Theory I first felt editing was but the logical consequence of the way in which one shoots. But, what I learned is that it is actually another writing.

As for my style, for my vision of the cinema, editing is not simply one aspect; it's the aspect.

As the actor, you can't be worried about the scene that you're going to playing two days from now. You think about what's going on, right now and in the moment. That's what you worry about. Everything is right then and there. In the end, all of the pieces come together, thanks to the editing and James Gunn.

A writer without a sense of justice or injustice would be better off editing the yearbook for a school for exceptional children.

A 3K word story might well be done in some caffeine-and-nicotine-fuelled 36 hour session, and at the end of it, there'll be a few passes of editing required, but I basically have a polished draft.

A lot of directors prefer the solitude of the editing process, but I revel in the craziness of what a film set is.

A lot of it is found in the editing room and part of that is due to some of the improvisational tactics we employ on set. Part of it is that the shot goes a little bit long and they end up coming down to fit time.

A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.

A lot of the issues of rhythm in film are found in the editing because it's very rare that any sequence is the sequence that is shot.

A lot of the music editing job is communication and working out what a director really wants the music to be.

A lot of young filmmakers bring their movies to my dad because he always gives lots of good editing ideas and notes. He'd be a good film professor.

A movie is a creative process from its conception, through its writing, to its execution, to the editing. I think with the best films there is some kind of contribution from one person all the way through that. The best films are made by people who write, direct, and edit, so there's continuity.

And I watch all the dailies and I grade the jokes or the moments, you know, on a scale from... so I know exactly what we have. And so I can then go into the editing room and be like "I want you to do this moment, this moment, this joke, that joke. I'd like to see 3 versions.

And then to see the whole movie, you're pretty much waiting until the end of production. And the major lifting in terms of editing and all that stuff is done before you shoot the movie. That's an unusual way to work.

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

Angelo Corrao was our editor [in Dream of Life], and he was just so diligent and so old-school in the way he looked at editing. He would take my far-out ideas and tame them and make sense of them.

Anyone who can not write should.

A perfect movie is a different thing, but a funny movie is easy. I was really happy that I got everyone that I got. Everybody got to play to their strengths and was paired up in the right scenarios. It was very fortunate. It was exciting, the whole process. It makes more difficulty in editing 'cause there's more footage, but the guy I had handle it was a documentarian editor for a long time, so it was very useful.

Basically, I composed the musical structure in one pass. The rest was editing and small adjustments. And when the play was read by actors with the music, the sequence timed-out perfectly.

Because the Pang brothers are twins, they would rotate days on set. One of them would be editing, and one of them would be shooting.

As a young filmmaker, I shot a lot of stuff because I wanted to make sure that I got everything, but now I've gotten much more precise with my shooting. Editing is a whole other layer because then, sometimes you realize characters don't even need to say this or that. It becomes an issue of exposition, and over-explaining something. In the script, I'd reinforce certain things about what I wanted people to know two or three times, but in the editing room, I'd be like, "I only need to say this once, maybe twice.

A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself.