Best Writing Process Quotes

"I always, in the writing, always start the name. Give me a name and just produce the story, not the other way back."

"Good writers will obsess over their works, they will pore over every minute element just trying to nitpick the hell out of everything to perfection."

"I kept thinking, I'd get feedback on a book from my readers, I'd send it around and I'd be like, 'Wow, there's so much wrong with this book. How about I just write a better one next time that doesn't have all these problems?'"

"Revision is a vital part of taking something good and making it great."

"I suspect I rewrote every sentence at least 15 times...I wanted to produce a book that I could not break, no matter what I did."

"Every poem in this book has been rewritten 20 or 30 times until they're almost unrecognizable but a noticeable improvement on the original draft."

"If you told me, like I should be okay if for some reason I was able to look in the future and find that this movie was never going to be made into anything other than a script. Now that would be disheartening for sure. But the process of writing it should be enjoyable and vibrant and life-giving regardless of the outcome."

"The product of my writing time is me, rather than the book. I am becoming a better writer for having written the book."

"Writing an essay is actually a spiritual journey...if you're bored writing an essay, it's because you're writing it wrong."

"People often ask me, 'Where does a book begin for you?'"

"It just makes me wanna see the thought process, right? It makes me wanna interview the writer."

"Allow yourself to write badly. Write a bad, bad, bad first draft and then edit it."

"Yeah, I can write, but it's not like the final version."

"In some of Kafka's most horrific stories his neighbors would complain because he would be laughing so hard late at night."

"If something's really good, it just pours out of you. But if it's something bad, you just want to write down everything that you could possibly think of."

"Take advantage of the fact that you can write it, read it again, check it, erase it, edit it and rewrite it."

"One of several things happens: I start to get really interested in the character and then I sidebar that character. I'll do something else with them later because if I let them go now they will overtake the narrative."

"Often I see it in the rewrite process... that's the place where it's hardest."

"I generally have very exhaustive beta reading process. I know what people are going to in general how they're going to respond to the book and things I worry about are generally things that are more experimental."

"Every word that you get down on that page is another little accomplishment."

"The sooner you realize your first draft is just a loose sketch of a full painting - one that will be developed and cooked over time - you’ll free yourself of unnecessary pressure."

"Rewatch, redraft and explore more than just how you felt."

"The joke is never done, it's always being rewritten all the time."

"I was wondering, how it is different for you as an author, as a writer when you write things where you invent most of the characters and the setting from the ground up?"

"When rewriting, you can get more analytical and use these questions so that you can find and fix your scenes' problems."

"Conventional stories are written when writers don't take that journey into the abyss and focus instead on simply hitting certain beats at exactly the right time."

"You can chart out character arcs, storyboard key scenes and just overall recreate the quintessential creator experience of staring down at a blank page, pen in hand, willing your brain to cooperate with you in turning it into something beautiful."

"The real work is always sitting in front of the blinking cursor and writing things."

"Start with a person or an event and work from that. Develop the short story idea prior to moving forward to actually writing the story."

"Zero drafting is just a lot of idea development."

"I get so much information then I have to decide what am I going to put in the books and what am I going to leave out."

"Writing is not a natural process even for people who are communicators like us, it's a very tough rigorous process."

"In order to reconstruct a character we need to dissect them first and figure out where the issue is."

"Nabokov always saw a whole novel and tire in his mind long before he started writing."

"On the writing side, it's basically the John show right now."

"There's something cool about the imperfections."

"When I write, I write very messily... then I'll do a neat copy."

"Your power with language, with words-- where do you go when you write this stuff?"

"Once I start putting them on paper, I can kind of see what I don't like, what I do like."

"Thank you to everyone who kept me company through the writer block, the research, and the exhaustion."

"I got tired no more drama a year before I started writing it."

"Each draft should be an iteration on success."

"the only way to write it is you think about what is you know what's happening in the scene or what happened in the news right what did Ted Cruz do and who's my audience and what does that make them"

"Art is messy, and being elitist about writing process is the stupidest thing ever."

"The real miracle of the writing process happens in editing."

"Get your dialogue heard out loud before your first draft is done. It's not finished until you've heard people speak the dialogue."

"These writers seem like they looked into Tolkien and then they're like the night before they're like oh crap man we're supposed to we're supposed to go into Amazon Studios tomorrow tomorrow and start writing like the script."

"Knowing what genre you’re working in is a good first step."

"Dan Harmon Justin Roiland and the rest of the Rick and Morty team started writing season six in the first half of 2020."

"Writing is painful when you're a really good writer."

"It's actually easier than writing a short story."

"I'd never written a novel that hadn't been planned before."

"I wrote a long essay, I thought about putting it in the second book."

"Keep a 'coulda shoulda woulda' list while writing your first draft of the ideas you have for edits and changes in your second draft."

"It's fun how those foundational elements are still something that I go back to in writing like really frequently."

"Keep writing it's just like throwing something at the wall and seeing if it sticks."

"Writing is rewriting. The first draft of anything is shit."

"Start writing and take the time to reread and correct your mistakes."

"Writing is reflective, allowing you to identify and correct mistakes more effectively."

"If you want your most authentic self on the page, you indeed must bleed."

"By the time you show it to people, you've gone through three or four drafts of something."

"Writing can be a long, frustrating, and humbling process, and the story we end up with often looks very different from its earliest version."

"Writing a book is one level deeper than reading a book."

"I always do what's called a vomit draft... you just don't care."

"Characters also become different people near the end of the drafting process than they are when we begin."

"There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all."

"Writing doesn't have to be painful - embrace the process."

"I planned a rough outline of the four entire books... and then I started writing it."

"Rewriting is a set of tools, just like plot, character, and soul."

"I didn't write a book, I wrote a thousand words a day."

"An entire novel came to me in space of a second."

"Every book is different; it depends on your relationship with the writer, your relationship with the editorial team."

"The work that scares people? Often in the rewrite process where you have spit out that first draft."

"Everything about me is weird, except for the part where you write a first draft and then you're like actually this isn't too bad."

"Just keep writing because you know what, it is so much easier to go back and edit something you've already written than to write from scratch."

"Progress will be made, and if I can say I at least finished a first draft, I'll feel more than accomplished because the first draft is always the most difficult."

"Never go backwards. Get your first ugly draft out, do not move backwards, move forwards." - Joey Capone

"Push the boat out you will find out new things about yourself and your writing ability in the process."

"Removing the expectations allowed myself to really just write whatever I felt like doing."

"But I'm really happy with how everything's going and I'm really I love my main character's new name I think it's great."

"Most of it happens in sequels as I am finishing an outline."

"Once you learn it, it becomes easy. The hardest part about it is sometimes as lyricists, we write freely so we don't write with just a cadence or stick to a certain cadence. We write what we feel and express that."

"Sometimes I wonder if the scripts for NetherRealm story modes actually go through more than one draft and it's [ __ ] like this that makes me wonder that."

"I'm writing another book right now. It's called draft writing."

"Writing us weird writings real weird yeah you have to be open to your methodology changing absolutely."

"Structure doesn't have to be set in stone at the writing stage but it's good to have your bigger pieces in place and then work through that to get to the finer stuff."

"Your first draft is probably not what the one you want to go with."

"Writing this book has been the hardest thing I've ever done."

"Writing yourself a big long explanation of what you are going to do in the very next chapters can be really handy."

"My outline is not 'this happens and this happens' it is 'here is this subplot and here are a bunch of things that need to happen for the subplot to work.'"

"That's probably where a lot of the fun in the writing comes from."

"Jill is getting formed by forming the committee, not by telling the actress or the writer who Jill is, but by forming Jill through the interrogation process."

"I'm writing her completely out of love and just building around her."

"Yes, well, of course, as you know I'm writing A Song of Ice and Fire."

"So I just write and chuck it out there and hope it sounds good and if it doesn't I fix it really quick on the fly."

"Transform your work with a structured approach."

"The first draft is not going to be perfect."

"It's worth realizing the book took a decade to write."

"Neil Gaiman said, 'The process of creating your second draft is the process of pretending or making it look like you knew what you were doing the entire time.'"

"I didn't start off wanting to write a book that long, but as you start getting into it, you realize, first of all, I want people to understand how I was making decisions."

"Forget everybody else in the world. It's you and the page and you're trying to write something which is truthful, which you would stand by, and that's it."

"No piece of writing is wasted; every sentence becomes fertilizer for future ideas to grow from."

"Keep perfectionism in its place; reserve it for the editing and revision stage."

"If you're writing you need stubbornness you need courage you need faith in yourself that's as strong as any Talent you may possess and you need to write that book the way you want to write it and keep trying to get it published and if that doesn't work self-publish it."

"The importance of drafts: writing is thinking, so get the whole story down in one sitting."

"Writers like to live the story they're writing about, get a feel of it, so it's easier for them to write about it."

"The editing process is part of the writing process."

"...a lot of people have ideas in their head that they just can't really put their finger on... and if you sit down and force yourself to write about that topic it things really start crystallizing and solidifying..."

"Writing an idea will inspire the next line."

"You're not writing the rest of the book, you are writing the next word, and then the next word, and then the next word."

"Typing isn't inherently progress either. I might discover a cool tidbit or line that I can put in my pocket for later but at best I'm wasting time and at worst I'm crystallizing scenes prematurely."

"My favorite part of the writing process is really like I just love kind of figuring out how all the pieces fit."

"You get to write that entire first draft by the seat of your pants, you don't have to feel limited by outlines and plots."

"It really just helps you tackle the revision process without having to do the search function on Microsoft Word or read through your book so many times trying to find specific details that need to be changed."

"Yeah, so what I've done is it was like, it was like a sculpture to me, so I would write a thousand words about my story and then I would go over it again and again and again."

"Living in a trailer, I believe he wrote Carrie which was his first book, didn't think it was any good, threw the manuscript in the trash, and his wife Tabitha pulled it out of the trash, read it and was like you got to finish this, this is really good."

"...asking yourself why will this be someone's favorite scene? Why am I going to have such a good time writing this?"

"Writing doesn't have to be this high friction process."

"Writing's the same way. You're collecting the dots of sap, and then what you're doing is with books that you read with articles, you're squeezing the sugar out of it and you're turning into something sweet and delicious that then is the process of writing from abundance."

"Writing is basically the process of taking what's in your brain and putting it on paper."

"Writing for me is the act of figuring things out... I understand certain things."

"Once you get past the outline, like you have the outline and then you know exactly what you need to write and you just need to fill in the details. Like, I just like going for it."

"The angrier you are, the worse novel you're liable to write."

"I find that the meditative reflex and the pausing to light were very, very helpful in my writing process."

"The only kind of writing is rewriting."

"Writing isn't just outputting text versus all these algorithms do."

"...sometimes I find it easier to write something starting from nothing than starting from something."

"...sometimes change places, sometimes it's the writing that gives me the ideas and sometimes it's the ideas they give me the writing."

"...even if it looks like it doesn't make any sense at first, make a decision and start writing."

"Create a writing process that makes you feel confident."

"That's what I mean by jumping into different characters and almost letting them write through you. Not even thinking about it as this is my writing style, but this is my character's writing style."

"Every first draft is kind of garbage. It's a little bit of a dumpster fire."

"Your first draft is kind of like a skeleton."

"First drafts are where most writers get stuck."

"Nobody really knows what their novel is going to look like in the end. Nobody knows the full finished perfect story."

"It feels like that should have been one of the main highlight scenes of your movie and it feels like that version of it was kind of written on a Sunday when it was due on Monday."

"The writing process itself is painful to me, I enjoy having it done and looking back and saying oh I wrote that."

"Discovering your own process is gonna help you write faster and write better."

"It took me about three years to write 'The Martian,' posting it a chapter at a time to my website."

"How do you approach more difficult subject matter when writing? How do you write about things that are controversial and traumatic without being tactless or performative?"

"I do a lot of research before I even start writing. I will take two to three months and just read and research."

"I just fell in love with doing it. It was, for me, the fun part of the research process without the writing. And I know that sounds terrible, but no, it doesn't."

"So what we can do is we can actually talk about our ideas, get them down on the page through talking, and then what we can do is we can transport them to the page. And like Ken Burns said, writing is a process of subtraction, distillation, deletion."

"It was actually pretty good to go through that process yeah for sure I think that is one of my um favorite Parts about writing the book for me was actually being able to deal with things that I didn't realize weren't dealt with."

"And the process of writing is not only refining that idea and helping you reflect on it, but you actually generate new ideas in the process of writing."

"There's no such thing as writing, it's all editing."

"I felt like it was like erecting a scaffold fold that gave you the sort of shape of the building the architecture of it and then the writing process is filling in all the bricks."

"I know that one day all those sentences will have periods and all those paragraphs will have structure and the book will be done."

"But after doing this process for a few projects now and finding it like consistent iterably easier and especially less stressful and like the revision in later stages I'm feeling really solid in calling this my current writing process."

"So knowing that my book fits into the new adult category impacted how I dealt with mature topics like sexuality, how I framed discussions of complex ideologies like feminism and patriarchy, and also how I incorporated sociological research studies into the narrative."

"It breaks it down into manageable chunks when you are plotting or even when you're writing."

"Writing is about reaction. Writing is about acting."

"The writing came very fast... Once I knew he was engaging with and reacting to the text in some way."

"I still zero draft, gotta get a feel for the characters then completely outline and then start over again on the first draft helped so much."

"So after having written that suddenly if somebody asks me detail I don't know, because it's come and it's written and it's washed out."

"You may at a certain point feel like you have to start putting in some kind of schedules to keep yourself on track with a specific project in order to get it done at a certain point but let the fun come back to your writing process first."

"I spend more time on the opening than any scene in The Script by far."

"What happens is I do this draft I listen to the person or that person I rewrite for an actor who doesn't commit I rewrite for a budget that's made up I rewrite based on the notes that the studio head scribbled while reading my script in the midst of 11 or 12 others."

"Once I have that writing done, I can go draw the comic, I can make it, I can publish it, and that's what I did."

"I write because I want to learn about the story, I write because I have questions about the story that I want to figure out the answers to."

"Some of you will start on this stage because your rough draft was so well done that you don't need to re-plot, you don't need to fill in holes, you don't need to rewrite."

"You have to be completely concentrated to write the original. But actually, I sat in the corner of bars in New Orleans and would listen to dialogue and stuff and add it to the screenplay. And then the screenplay developed from there. And it's an organic process."

"Jimmy is the only main character who made it through the rewrites relatively unscathed."

"That's how I write books, I find that with social media actually as well."

"Every project is challenging; every novel will have a time where it's boring and it's not exciting to work on."

"Writing is a gradual and difficult process, but it's my hope that with this video, you can walk away with a sense of structure and clarity that will help you feel more confident as you embark on the process of writing your next literature review."

"It's okay to filter the ways you get feedback. You don't have to get feedback on your work in a specific way just because it's the norm."

"I feel very free there. I write on my living room couch. I've been writing on my living room couch for 20 years probably. It's a comfort zone for me."

"The first thing that I like to do is have a look to see what has already been published that I can use to structure my own response."

"Deep play... let's face it, writing is hell," Styron told The Paris Review. "I get a fine warm feeling when I'm doing well, but that pleasure is pretty much negated by the pain of getting started every day."

"The most difficult thing is rewriting. It's much harder than writing in the first place."

"This [ __ ] is how the writing process went down."

"The vast majority of writing happens away from the page."

"You don't actually need to write in solitude."

"'The reason this album sounds different is because of the way we wrote it. It has a certain kind of aura you can't put your finger on.'"

"No, it was kind of a long, long process and it all began with my mother and my wife told me many times that I should. My mother was very funny, and I should write about my mother, and then I was working on a show and another writer told me the same thing."

"I always struggle with the writing stage and getting into a bit of a flow with it and I think I'm finally catching my stride."

"My process has changed in that I think my writing's gotten tighter, short, crisp, cinematic chapters."

"How does Mark Normand write comedy? Well hold on let me get up and uh you know I do a lot of writing in hotel rooms because you can get some real freedom."

"Get out of your own way and just be able to focus on writing."

"In 'Breasts and Eggs' by Miko Kawakami, the character Rika says this brilliant line where she says, 'Forget about inventing things, just write what's real. Just write real stuff, you know?'"

"I genuinely feel like I didn't really know how to write until I wrote this book."

"The strength of my language is largely the result of my capacity for revision. I write terrible first drafts."

"The writing is a process of self-discovery."

"I feel like the writer's room with this, I get a lot of Pepe Silvia vibes."

"The most important thing is pushing yourself to a terrible draft so that you can revise it later."

"The first thing to do for a writing assignment is to read the prompt carefully."

"When you say you did 30 drafts, what you are telling the person you're talking to is that you're a serious writer."

"The outlining process is where a lot of the fun and creativity can happen. It's where you have the joy of exploring and discovering your story."

"This is like one of those like, you know, one of a hundred scribbled notes that you throw down in an old notebook when you're starting to write a poem and then you will come back to it later."

"Most people are intimidated by the writing process because they're thinking, 'How do I make something perfect?' You know what? You don't. You start out with something crappy and you make it better and better incrementally."

"Implementing strategies to try and fix your most common problems... is one of the most important places to start when you're creating a writing process that's going to work for you long term."

"Find what works for you without worrying about how long it takes to write the book."

"Translate your process so the reader understands."

"We've seen that Master Class where Gaiman's like blocking stuff out on pages."

"Never be afraid to scribble things out."

"The whole process of writing the book was like trying to get to that scene."

"Go over it, get someone to proofread it... whether it be a friend, teacher, parent, anyone."

"I never really know why at the beginning, I just know that I would like to write about that subject."

"Revising is actually where all of the magic happens."