Book Quote by James A. Owen

“First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge & enhance an idea,…

— Bernard Malamud

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to…

— Bernard Malamud

First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea,…

— Bernard Malamud

“While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features…

— Patricia Hickman

The novel is never really in the first draft. The novel really happens in the revisions.

— Tama Janowitz

All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come,…

— T. E. Lawrence

“Hey Revision. You can be a pain but you do make Book better.”

— Buffy Andrews

“You write your first draft with your heart, and you rewrite with your head.”

— James Ellison

“I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and…

— Libba Bray

“The purpose of the first draft is not to get it right, but to get it written.”

— John Dufresne

But revision is a creative act, not merely an analytical imposition of rules of style on a more creative first draft. That's a myth…

— K. M. Soehnlein

“and yet the original Writers at Work volumes, especially the first three, possessed a magic all their own. As a teenager, I virtually memorized…

— Michael Dirda