Wordcrafts - Writing and Editing

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing."

"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."

"If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing."

"You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club."

"Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake."

"The drudgery of being a professional writer comes in trying to make good days out of bad days and in squeezing out the words when they won't just flow."

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write."

"The first and most important thing of all, at least for writers today, is to strip language clean, to lay it bare down to the bone."

"Writing is a craft not an art."

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis."