editing

Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, "Oh well, let it go, that's what copyeditors are for.

You are an author! You will be a published author. Take pride in that, and present only your best work. Then, continue to improve, so your best gets even better.

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma...

Writing is like riding a bike. Once you gain momentum, the hills are easier. Editing, however, requires a motor and some horsepower.

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is.

The great correspondent of the seventeenth century Madame de Sevigne counseled, "Take chocolate in order that even the most tireome company seem acceptable to you," which is also sound advice today!

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

When I'm writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I'm editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

No words are too good for the cutting-room floor, no idea so fine that it cannot be phrased more succinctly.

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

If I__ asking what kind of __eturn_ I should be expecting on the sacrifices I__ making, I have in that question revealed the need to __eturn_ that question to wherever I found it and have the word __eturn_ edited out of it.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it's pretty useless.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It__ definitely possible to write a book in a month, leave it unedited, and watch it go off into the world and be declared a masterpiece. It happens every fifty years or so.For the rest of us, the single greatest ally we have is time. There__ no page of prose in existence that its author can__ improve after it__ been in a drawer for a week. The same is true on the macro level _ every time I finish a story or a book, I try to put it away and forget it for as long as I can. When I return, its problems are often so obvious and easy to fix that I__ amazed I ever struggled with them.Amateur writers are usually desperate to be published, as soon as possible. And I understand that feeling _ you just want it to start, your career, your next book, whatever. But I wonder how many self-published novels might have had a chance at getting bought, and finding more readers, if their authors had a bit more patience with them?

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they're more of an example to young people than adults books are.

Learn to enjoy this tidying process. I don't like to write; I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that wont the game.

Writing is a bitch. It's an itch that I love to scratch.

One of the hardest things for a writer to do is delete words.