1st July 2016 | for Creatives | creative process, writing, editing, rewriting, Ann Hood |
"[The airplane pilot] said, 'Why do you think I do this job? It's for the seven minutes of takeoff and the 11 minutes of landing. The computer does the rest.' And to me, that's like writing. You do it because you get this great idea, and you have the excitement of the first draft, but most of it is revision, and doing the wrong stuff, and fixing and fixing. And then, you get the landing. It's very much the same."
"Imagine sentences instead of writing them... Keep them imaginary until you're happy with them. Revise at the point of composition. Compose at the point of revision. Accept no provisional sentences. Make no drafts. And no draft sentences. Bring the sentence you're working on as close to its final state as you can before you write it down and after. Think of composition and revision as the same thing."
"The only reason writers publish is to stop rewriting."
"I never correct anything and I never go back to what I have written, except to the foot of the last page to see where I have got to. If you once look back, you are lost. ... By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren't disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks."
"The first comment I got from my editor was that it was the most linear plot she'd ever read, and she could predict exactly what was going to happen, and I needed to rip the whole thing apart and redo it. So that's where I got with outlining."
"Read the first five pages. Count clichés. If you find one, the buzzer goes off: it's not a serious novel. A serious novelist notices clichés and eliminates them. The serious novelist doesn't write 'quiet as a mouse' or paint the world in clichéd moral terms. You could almost just substitute the adjective 'cliché-free' for 'serious.'"
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