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Every poem probably has sixty drafts behind it. -- Mary Karr
I wrote the screenplay for 'This Is Where I Leave You' - all 40 drafts of it. -- Jonathan Tropper
Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money. -- Ambrose Bierce
Obviously, drafts sometimes are good ones, or bad ones; I think you can get a good, quality player late in the lottery. -- Grant Hill
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material. -- Jennifer Egan
I keep the drafts of each poem in color-coded folders. I pick up the folders according to how I feel about that color that day. -- Rita Dove
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be. -- Alice Dreger
The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end. -- Charles Caleb Colton
I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it. -- Michael Chabon
I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I'm teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts. -- Marilyn Hacker
There's pressure to come up with something genius every time. I feel like I keep letting myself down with my Twitter posts. I have to start keeping a journal of rough drafts of prophetic ideas about the world. -- Ari Graynor
You know, my first three or four drafts, you can see, are on legal pads in long hand. And then I go to a typewriter, and I know everybody's switching to a computer. And I'm sort of laughed at. -- Robert Caro
This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely. -- Robert B. Parker
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door. -- Billy Collins
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room. -- Colm Toibin
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside. -- Anne Tyler
I don't read anything electronically. I don't write electronically, either - except e-mails to my family and friends. I write in longhand. I have always written first drafts by hand, but I used to write subsequent drafts and insert pages on a typewriter. -- John Irving
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite. -- Chuck Palahniuk
I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments. -- Jennifer Egan
I usually do at least a dozen drafts and progressively make more-conscious decisions. Because I've always believed stories are closer to poems than novels, I spend a lot of time on the story's larger rhythms, such as sentence and paragraph length, placement of flashbacks and dialogue. -- Ron Rash
The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer. -- J. G. Ballard
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts. -- James Patterson
Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It's the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It's that important, so don't mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write. -- Nicholas Sparks
Recently a study proved that working from a larger, less cluttered computer screen increases concentration. I could have told them that. And yes, I write first drafts with a mechanical pencil and a yellow legal pad. There's good reason for this primitive behavior: I am a crackerjack typist. My hand moves far more quickly than my brain. -- Stacy Schiff
I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts. -- Judy Blume
I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book. -- E. L. Doctorow
First drafts are for learning what your story is about. -- Bernard Malamud
The excesses of our youth are drafts upon our old age. -- Charles Caleb Colton
A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts. -- Malcolm Muggeridge
I write on a laptop, so it's impossible to count drafts anymore. -- Garrison Keillor
I've always preferred writing in longhand. I've always written first drafts in longhand. -- John Irving
You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone. -- Erica Jong
We are all continually embarking on first drafts, in every aspect of our lives. -- Jules Feiffer
I've done as many as 20 or 30 drafts of a story. Never less than 10 or 12 drafts. -- Raymond Carver
Good first drafts and speedy responses to consumer dialog will always trump lawyered corporate speak. -- John Battelle
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum. -- Vladimir Nabokov
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done. -- Clifford Geertz
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done -- Clifford Geertz
It took me years of attempts and failed drafts before I finally wrote the elegies I needed to write. -- Natasha Trethewey
When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot. -- Andrew Davies
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts. -- Alice Mattison
A writer must have all the confidence in the world when writing the first draft and none whatsoever when editing subsequent drafts. -- T. Davis Bunn
I need about one hundred fifty drafts of a poem to get it right, and fifty more to make it sound spontaneous. -- James Dickey
Love lies in those unsent drafts in your mailbox. Sometimes you wonder whether things would have been different if you'd clicked 'Send'. -- Faraaz Kazi
It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts. -- Naguib Mahfouz
I prefer to write first drafts as soon as possible after waking, so that the oneiric inscape is still present to me. -- Will Self
I wish I wrote drafts and then revised them, but I don't. What I do is I seem to revise as I go. -- Edward Hirsch
In my own work, I usually revise through forty or fifty drafts of a poem before I begin to feel content with it. -- Mary Oliver
It's always hard, but it's always fun to attack a premise that you think is interesting. It does take a few drafts for sure. -- Victor Levin
I began my first novel when I was 15. It went through three drafts, of around 40,000 words each. If I find it, I'll burn it. -- Charles Stross
Our job is to ask questions of children so that children internalize these questions and ask them of themselves and their own emerging drafts. -- Lucy Calkins
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I'm pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don't turn in something that's so ungodly they go, 'What the hell is this?' -- Joe Carnahan
Writers know all the good reasons for subjecting their work to a sharp trim. Early drafts are notorious for repetition, indirection and overdevelopment of the trivial. -- Pamela Erens
I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer. -- Rita Dove
No heating system can deliver perfectly uniform temperatures throughout a house, and drafts can magnify the perceived difference in temperatures. Try walking around with a thermometer. -- Seth Shostak
I love words; I love the way they sound. Once I've worked on everything else, the last drafts of my books come down to how they sound. -- Kate DiCamillo
I've found that my first drafts are not so special. But the more I work on them, the better they get. They are more unique and defensible. -- George Saunders
I'm still learning so much with every play I write. So I wrestle with word choice, rhythm in final drafts. I think you have to be ruthless. -- Stephen Karam
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible. -- Gore Vidal
I build a book the way coral reefs are built: millions of little calcareous skeletons piling up one atop another, though in my case the skeletons are drafts. -- Dean Koontz
As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive. -- Alexander Chee
You have to get something down, and then find ways of working in complexity and different layers of meaning... My first drafts are usually the ravings of a delusional fantasist. -- Peter Wolf
Secure writers don't sell first drafts. They patiently rewrite until the script is as director-ready, as actor-ready as possible. Unfinished work invites tampering, while polished, mature work seals its integrity. -- Robert McKee
Editing is just ongoing. I don't count drafts, or know what would fully constitute a draft. But I try to fix as I go. And there's always more to fix. -- Lorrie Moore
To be honest, I wrote so many drafts of this book [ The Nightingale ] and changed the characters so many times; the real surprise is that I finished the book at all. -- Megan Chance
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. -- James A. Michener
If you imagine the world listening, you'll never write a line. That's why privacy is so important. You should write first drafts as if they will never be shown to anyone. -- Erica Jong
I am never at picnics. The ground was not meant to be sat upon in its raw state, I feel sure, and I prefer my food without either caterpillars or drafts! -- Phyllis Bottome
I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on. -- Dean Koontz
Redrafts can be very lucrative for me, but you must understand that if films go through many drafts or writers it's because someone doesn't want to do the picture and never will. -- William Monahan
Second, there were the discussions and drafts leading up to the White Paper on Employment Policy of 1944 in which the UK government accepted the maintenance of employment as an obligation of governmental policy. -- James Meade
For me and most of the other writers I know, writing is not rapturous. In fact, the only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really shitty first drafts. -- Anne Lamott
October extinguished itself in a rush of howling winds and driving rain and November arrived, cold as frozen iron, with hard frosts every morning and icy drafts that bit at exposed hands and faces. -- J. K. Rowling
Remember that a book is many drafts - mine certainly are. It's improvisation. It's as much jazz and the way we talk and the way I heard people preach coming up as it is writing. -- John Edgar Wideman
When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted. -- Gunter Grass

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