Wordcrafts - Writing and Editing

"You need not expect to get your book right the first time. Go to work and revamp or rewrite it. God only exhibits his thunder and lightning at intervals, and so they always command attention. These are God's adjectives. You thunder and lightning too much; the reader ceases to get under the bed, by and by."

"Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out."

"Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say 'infinitely' when you mean 'very'; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite."

"I discovered that rejections are not altogether a bad thing. They teach a writer to rely on his own judgment and to say in his heart of hearts, 'To hell with you.'"

"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor."

"Fiction is the truth inside the lie."

"When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them - then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart."

"English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment and education -- sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across the street."

"The best way to become acquainted with a subject is to write a book about it."

"The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar and familiar things new."