Closets Quote by Alice Sebold

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 write to find out what the story means to me, that is what I try to do especially with the first draft.

— Wally Lamb

I'd like to think that if you find your audience there are still opportunities there to go and tell an original story.

— Gore Verbinski

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men…

— Tom Waits

The first draft is just you telling yourself the story.

— Terry Pratchett

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

Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.

— Evan Hunter

I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts.

— Raymond Carver

I believe that we can access stories, and voices from those around us, more easily often than from our own imperfect memories.

— Tom Barbash

There are some writers who are done when they finish a draft because they've thought it through beforehand. Whereas I'll finish a first draft…

— Heidi Julavits

For a fiction writer, a storyteller, the world is full of stories, and when a story is there, it's there, and you just reach…

— Ursula K. Le Guin

First drafts are for learning what your story is about.

— Bernard Malamud