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,...

Flow is something the reader experiences, not the writer.

Sometimes I write about the forest, sometimes I write about the trees, and occasionally I’ll write about the lumberjack. Actually, the lumberjack is more the editing part, figuring what needs to be cut.

I want you to judge me without thinking about it.I want you to give me advice without considering my opinion.I want you to expecting anything without the need to trust me.I want you to decide...

It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.

You should edit before and after editing.

How do you end a story that’s not yours? Add another sentence where there is a pause? Infiltrate the story with a comma when really there should have been a period? Punctuate with an exclamation...

So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts – written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus –...

Isn’t one of the first lessons of good elocution that there’s nothing one can say in any rambling, sprawling rant that can’t, through some effort, be said shorter and better with a little careful editing?...

Chicken Noodle Soup for the Stomach.” I wrote it with alphabet soup, and then edited it with a can of chicken noodle soup.

Editing fiction is like using your fingers to untangle the hair of someone you love.

There should be no crying in copyediting.

[Women’s magazines]ignore older women or pretend that they don’t exist; magazines try to avoid photographs of older women, and when they feature celebrities who are over sixty, ‘retouching artists’ conspire to ‘help’ beautiful women look...

An editor doesn’t just read, he reads well, 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 its...

… The Book is more important than your plans for it. You have to go with what works for The Book ~ if your ideas appear hollow or forced when they are put on paper,...

As we change, our writing changes too. You cannot write the same poem twice. And that’s a good thing.

It’s easy to see what to do once it’s already been done. The difficult time is before it’s to be done, and while you’re doing it. This is the difference between writing and editing.

When I’m writing, I make words my b*tch. But when I’m editing, the words make me their b*tch. It all equals out in the end.

As the trees turned red, then white, then naked as pitchforks, Margot and Xiao Chen immersed themselves in several forests’ worth of pages, and I watched, tortured, as brick after brick of a new development...

Don’t be dismayed by the opinions of editors, or critics. They are only the traffic cops of the arts.

There is a saying: Genius is perseverance. While genius does not consist entirely of editing, without editing it’s pretty useless.

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author’s intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don’t make sense when...

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