What is it about us lady authors and our fascination for the exclamation mark?

Books in the YA genre, in particular, should use proper grammar because they’re more of an example to young people than adults books are.

A writer edits his thoughts more thoroughly the more readers he has. You can tell I only have two readers, myself included.

Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.

I’d known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I’d pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as...

As an editor, you develop a B.S. meter—an internal warning system that signals caution about journalism that doesn’t feel trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a quote or incident that’s too perfect —a feeling I always had when...

There are plenty of bad editors who try to impose their own vision on a book. (…)A good novel editor is invisible.

[M]any people believe that memory works like a recording device. You just record the information, then you call it up and play it back when you want to answer questions or identify images. But decades...

Only the writers can change or fix the past by going back to edit old works

I’m an open book—an open book I’m still writing and editing. My book is a romance novel, sort of like The Secret.

While writing is like a joyful release, editing is a prison where the bars are my former intentions and the abusive warden my own neuroticism.

A brain is like a muscle, a serial connection that you should train everyday; if you don’t use it, you loose it

What I don’t have in theater is editing.

Sometimes a fresh perspective is all you need to get a second wind on the revision process. Try viewing your material on a different medium; it will shed a new light on the inconsistencies in...

Making love to me is amazing. Wait, I meant: making love, to me, is amazing. The absence of two little commas nearly transformed me into a sex god.

On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature:It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for...

If you can listen to or read anything, but misspelled words offend you, raise your hadn.

Growing a culture requires a good storyteller. Changing a culture requires a persuasive editor.

The great correspondent of the seventeenth century Madame de Sevigne counseled, “Take chocolate in order that even the most tireome company seem acceptable to you,” which is also sound advice today!

There are editing procedures for talks just as there are editing procedures in jazz improvisation.

Apparently, my hopes, dreams and aspirations were no match against my poor spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”(Casual Chance, 1964)

Editing is kind of a solitary job.

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.

If I can only write my memoir once, how do I edit it?

Your first draft is a petulant teenager, sure it knows best, adamant that its Mother is wrong. Your third draft has emerged from puberty, realising that its Mother was right about everything.

Writing Tip:Don’t let the “writing rules” bog you down when you’re writing the first draft; they don’t matter when you’re writing the story, only when you’re editing the story.

I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.

You can’t act for the editing. You just go in and do the scene the way you think is right.

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.

Nothing says work efficiency like panic mode.

Remove the comma, replace the comma, remove the comma, replace the comma…

Edit your manuscript until your fingers bleed and you have memorized every last word. Then, when you are certain you are on the verge of insanity…edit one more time!

I edit my own stories to death. They eventually run and hide from me.

In writing, there is art. And in art, there is craft …

Verbose is not a synonym for literary.

There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without...

Rather than trying to reinvent the wheel, build on to that which is already excellent.

I have always believed in the principle that immediate survival is more important than long-term survival.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

We never end up with the book we began writing. Characters twist it and turn it until they get the life that is perfect for them. A good writer won’t waste their time arguing with...

What do you think editing is?

Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,–and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,–and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many...

There Are Two Typos Of People In This World: Those Who Can Edit And Those Who Can’t

Feature filmmaking is a different kind of complication as documentary comes in the editing room.

When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there,...

It has been our experience that American houses insist on very comprehensive editing; that English houses as a rule require little or none and are inclined to go along with the author’s script almost without...

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

To me, the single biggest mark of the amateur writer is a sense of hurry.Hurry to finish a manuscript, hurry to edit it, hurry to publish it. It’s definitely possible to write a book in...

Anyone and everyone taking a writing class knows that the secret of good writing is to cut it back, pare it down, winnow, chop, hack, prune, and trim, remove every superfluous word, compress, compress, compress…Actually,...