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.