“ The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeedin… Stephen King
“ An editor doesn't just read, he reads , and reading well is a creative, powerful act. The ancients knew this and it frightened them. Mesopotamian society, for instance, did not want great reading from… Susan Bell
“ I think the hard work of writing is just how long a book is terrible before it's good. Leigh Bardugo
“ I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book. Libba Bray
“ When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime. Don Roff
“ Children being children, however, the grotesque Hopping Pot had taken hold of their imaginations. The solution was to jettison the pro-Muggle moral but keep the warty cauldron, so by the middle of the… J.K. Rowling
“ From the photo albums, every single print of her had been peeled away. Shots of the both of us together had been cut, the parts with her neatly trimmed away, leaving my image behind. Photos of me alon… Haruki Murakami
“ Then based on her own recent experience, the Divine Presence had a cruelly perverse sense of humor and His Grand Plan needed drastic revision. Judith McNaught
“ What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storyte… William Maxwell
“ Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial. Pamela Erens
“ People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes. Neal Stephenson
“ Lie naked on the table, and let them cut. Criticism is surgery, and humility is the anesthetic that allows you to tolerate it. In the end, the process will make you a stronger, more flexible, and trul… Molly Cochran
“ I've found the best way to revise your own work is to pretend that somebody else wrote it and then to rip the living shit out of it. Don Roff
“ The best advice I can give on this is, once it's done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When yo… Neil Gaiman
“ The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeedin… Stephen King
“ To look at the work of your peers, and learn how to explain with kindness and precision, the nature of their mistakes is, in fact, how you learn to diagnose your own work. Steve Almond
