14th March 2017 | for Creatives | creative process, writing, editing, rewriting, Daniel Parsons |
"If you can still tell what's red ink on your manuscript and what's your own blood then you haven't finished editing."
"[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."
"The most important thing is to tell your story the way it needs to be told without shortchanging the reader or keeping gratuitous bits that could be streamlined to keep the pace moving."
"You have to be ruthless. There comes a point when you know in your gut something just isn't working, or isn't as good as it should be."
"What I've found over the years is that I've never regretted anything I've ditched—I've only regretted the stuff I've left in."
"The only reason writers publish is to stop rewriting."
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