First Draft Quotes
91 quotes by 83 authors
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I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.
— Nora Roberts
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I generally write a first draft that's pretty lean. Just get the story down.
— Nora Roberts
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It can take years. With the first draft, I just write everything. With the second draft, it becomes so depressing for me, because I realize…
— David Sedaris
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Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional…
— William Zinsser
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It's one of the things writing students don't understand. They write a first draft and are quite disappointed, or often should be disappointed. They don't…
— Elizabeth Hardwick
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Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as…
— Rose Tremain
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Getting that first draft out is a horribly hard grind, but that (perversely) is where the joy of it lies.
— Jonathan Stroud
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Some writers find that they don't know their themes until they've finished the first draft (I am one). They then rewrite with an eye toward…
— Nancy Kress
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For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I…
— John Sayles
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So in the first draft, I'm inventing people and place with a broad schematic idea of what's going to happen. In the process, of course,…
— Peter Carey
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The first draft of everything, I write longhand. One of the nice things about that is that it makes you keep going. If you write…
— Jonathan Dee
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I revise constantly, as I go along and then again after I've finished a first draft. Few of my novels contain a single sentence that…
— Michael Cunningham
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I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to…
— Marilyn Hacker
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News is the first draft of history.
— Ben Bradlee
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Writing is so hard.... The first draft writing is so hard that sometimes in the beginning, before the work itself takes over, carrying you on…
— Sophy Burnham
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I tend to write things seven times before I show them to my editor. I write them seven times, then I take them on tour,…
— David Sedaris
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The research is the easiest. The outline is the most fun. The first draft is the hardest, because every word of the outline has to…
— Ken Follett
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All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in…
— T.E. Lawrence
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Everything you've ever read of mine is first-draft. This is one of the peculiarities of the comics field. By the time you're working on chapter…
— Alan Moore
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In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some…
— James Patterson
Who Wrote These First Draft Quotes
83 authors contributed a total of 91 First Draft Quotes, led by these top contributors: