ab chaos lex

REVISION = RE-SEEing

                                                                     but how does re-seeing a story become revising a text?

Good advice from John Irving:

"I have no doubt that I have learned more from wrestling than from Creative Writing classes; good writing means rewriting, and good wrestling is a matter of redoing repetition without cease is obligatory, until the moves become second nature. I have never thought of myself as a 'born' writer anymore than I think of myself as a 'natural' athlete, or even a good one. What I am is a good rewriter; I never get anything right the first time--I just know how to revise, and revise."  --John Irving, The Imaginary Girlfriend: A Memoir (Toronto, Canada: Knopf, 1996), p. 128.

Disturbing Advice from William Faulkner:

AND:

"Books aren't written- they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it." Michael Crichton

"Half my life is an act of revision." John Irving

"Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

"The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug." Mark Twain

"The wastebasket is the writer's best friend." Isaac Singer

"The most valuable of talents is never using two words when one will do." Thomas Jefferson

"What I had to face, the very bitter lesson that everyone who wants to write has got to learn, was that a thing may in itself be the finest piece of writing one has ever done, and yet have absolutely no place in the manuscript one hopes to publish." Thomas Wolfe

"Writing is rewriting….To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing." Richard North Patterson

"This morning I took out a comma, and this afternoon I put it back again." Oscar Wilde
 

"I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive."
— Susan Sontag

When I say writing, O believe me, it is rewriting that I have chiefly in mind.
— Robert Louis Stevenson

Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what it is one is saying.
— John Updike

"To be a writer is to throw away a great deal, not to be satisfied, to type again, and then again and once more, and over and over." John Hersey

"My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: when you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip." Elmore Leonard

"When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don't mean utterly, but kill most of them -- then the rest will be valuable." Mark Twain