20 Great Writers on the Art of Revision

In the next post, I will be picking up on the series on rewriting I started last week. In the meantime, courtesy of Flavorwire, here are some great words of wisdom from some great writers:

“The best advice I can give on this is, once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that’s revision.” 
 — Neil Gaiman

“Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress.” — Nick Hornby

“I have rewritten — often several times — every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” — Vladimir Nabokov

Interviewer: How much rewriting do you do?
Hemingway: It depends. I rewrote the ending of Farewell to Arms, the last page of it, 39 times before I was satisfied.
Interviewer: Was there some technical problem there? What was it that had stumped you?
Hemingway: Getting the words right.
 — Ernest Hemingway, The Paris Review Interview, 1956

Your characters are alive. Your story universe is alive. Therefore doesn’t it make sense that the stories we write have a vitality to them as well? They are not static, but organic. So of course we are going to be rewriting our stories, over and over again, hoping with each draft to get more into synch with their vibrant emerging nature.

That along with a shit-ton of hard work. That’s rewriting.

For more of the Flavorwire article, go here.

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