Books Quote by Alice Mattison

There's never any humongous next draft. I know a writer who every time he finished a novel - you would know his name very…

— Dean Koontz

I write a ridiculous number of drafts. The characters change and grow through the drafting, and my understanding of them deepens. Creating characters in…

— Robert Boswell

It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I…

— David Sedaris

I'm trying to break myself of that habit [of not writing out a first draft ] because I'm working on a couple novels and…

— Donald Ray Pollock

I wrote the first draft of the New People quickly but it had been percolating a lot longer. It's a hard question to answer…

— Danzy Senna

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written

— Alice Hoffman

Some stories or passages are more difficult and demand more fussing with than others, but, in general, I'm a two-draft writer rather than a…

— John Updike

I write by hand in my notebooks and number the drafts, so I know how crazy I can get with this. Some writers, like…

— Peter Orner

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as…

— Sarah Dessen

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

— Andrew Sean Greer

This is all you have to do. Sit down once a day to the novel and start working without internal criticism, without debilitating expectations,…

— Walter Mosley

It's more like I write multiple first drafts, handwritten. So with my first novel, I wrote whole drafts from different points of view. There…

— Lauren Groff