48 Editing Quotes

It would be absurd for me or any other editor to review the authenticity or accuracy of stories that are nominated for prizes.

With chemical film, it was possible to alter photographs, but you had to be an expert. That's not true any more. The LA Times fired a photographer at the beginning of the Iraq War for editing two shots together. Photography is crumbling. Certainly it is for the newspapers a bit now, isn't it? There will be painting again, absolutely!

Should novels generally be 600 pages? No, they should not. Half of writing, maybe 3/4 of writing, is editing. This seems to be a thing that has not gotten through to them. It's my impression that you could get rid of half of most of these books. These people are not good enough to be this long, but they're apparently also not good enough to be shorter.

American Gods is about 200,000 words long, and I'm sure there are words that are simply in there 'cause I like them. I know I couldn't justify each and every one of them.

I always record far more than I can use. There's probably twice as much recorded as comes out.

I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.

I have never thought of myself as a good writer. Anyone who wants reassurance of that should read one of my first drafts. But I'm one of the world's great rewriters.

1. Find a subject you care about. 2. Do not ramble, though. 3. Keep it simple. 4. Have the guts to cut. 5. Sound like yourself. 6. Say what you mean to say. 7. Pity the readers.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

Art, it seems to me, should simplify finding what conventions of form and what detail one can do without and yet preserve the spirit of the whole- so that all that one has suppressed and cut away is there to the reader's consciousness as much as if it were in type on the page.

Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.

The players often mentioned it as an honour to Shakespeare, that in his writing, whatsoever he penned, he never blotted out a line. My answer hath been, 'Would he had blotted a thousand.'

Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte.

The rules of The Elements of Style were as simple to state - 'Omit needless words' - as they were difficult to obey.

Of course there are boob and bad reporters who bring in boob and bad items which are printed, and which make so many papers what they are. But there are more intelligent men who try to bring in intelligent items, only to see them changed into imbecile items, with the result that they may easily give up trying, and accustom themselves instead to the spirit of the office....

About James Clemens's Wit'ch Storm: 'Nothin'g sa'ys q'uality fantas'y l'ike misuse'd apos'tro'phes.'

Tor is the hard one. They employ a lot of editors, whose tastes vary. They don't always indicate who has edited what (on the choice of the editor, I think) so editor stalking can be more difficult with Tor. Ear-tagging works but is rather surprisingly illegal.

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You don't know what I'm up against. Because it's full of, of, of things that are only correct because they're grammatical, but they're tough on the ear, you see. This is a very wearying one. It's unpleasant to read. Unrewarding. 'Because Findus freeze the cod at sea, and then add a crumb-crisp' Ooh, 'crumb-crisp coating.' Ahh, that's tough, 'crumb-crisp coating.' I think, no, because of the way it's written, you need to break it up, because it's not, it's not as conversationally written.

I save about twenty drafts -- that's ten meg of disc space -- and the last one contains all the final alterations. Once it has been printed out and received by the publishers, there's a cry here of 'Tough shit, literary researchers of the future, try getting a proper job!' and the rest are wiped.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very'; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

I'm sorry this letter is so long, but I did not have time to make it shorter.

An editor is someone who separates the wheat from the chaff and then prints the chaff.

A murder without gleaming scissors is like asparagus without the hollandaise sauce - tasteless.

Poets lose half the praise they should have got, Could it be known what they discreetly blot.

The economy of a novelist is a little like that of a careful housewife who is unwilling to throw away anything that might perhaps serve its turn. Perhaps the comparison is closer to the Chinese cook who leaves hardly any part of a duck unserved.

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He picked out this sentence in a New Yorker casual of mine: 'After dinner, the men moved into the living room,' and he wanted to know why I, or the editors, had put in the comma. I could explain that one all night. I wrote back that this particular comma was Ross's way of giving the men time to push back their chairs and stand up.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counseling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

I don't really start until I get my proofs back from the printers. Then I can begin my serious writing.

A poet can survive everything but a misprint.

Film composing is a splendid discipline, and I recommend a course of it to all composition teachers whose pupils are apt to be dawdling in their ideas, or whose every bar is sacred and must not be cut or altered.

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.

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The corollary is that no writer will take all of his or her editor's advice; for all have sinned and fallen short of editorial perfection. Put another way, to write is human, to edit is divine.

When you write a story, you're telling yourself the story...When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

Kill your darlings.