Best 420 quotes in «editing quotes» category

Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form." [Letter to Max E. Feckler, Oct. 26, 1914]

Most often when I stammer That's my brain Correcting my grammer.

Most of these editors, as they call themselves, couldn't even effectively edit a haiku.

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, build on to that which is already excellent.

Put your manuscript down, I'd recommend at least two months. Six would be ideal. You really need to get away from it long enough to change your mindset. Unless you have a photographic memory, this technique will work. You'll transform into the one thing you crave feedback from: a reader.

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words.

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it." (Casual Chance, 1964)

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...

Style and voice are different. Style is standard conventions of writing; voice is the distinct way an individual puts words together. All good writers have a near-uniform understanding of style, but a voice all their own.

So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts – written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus – that have been edited and selected out of hundreds of other documents, and bound together into one hotchpotch volume, under the orders of a political primate, Pope Damasus. And, you’re still content to condemn the living love I feel here and now, because of that dusty accident of bad editing? Why?

Self publishing' is not as easy as it is portrayed! When you think you have finished your book, proof read, proof read again, and again, and again. Don't believe it is ready until you have a hard copy proofed!

The goal of text generation is to throw confused, wide-eyed words on a page; the goal of text revision is to scrub the rods clean so that they sound nice and can go out in public.

There should be no crying in copyediting.

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

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

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!

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)

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

[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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.