Finish. Revise. Persist. That’s what it takes to get published. But too many writers skip the rigorous revision process so critical to making your book go from good to great. Because revision is where the magic happens.
Here’s some insider tips from bestselling authors on how to make the most of the revision process.
“The secret to good writing is rewriting.”
—William Zinsser
“Once I get over maybe a hundred pages, I won’t go back to page one, but I might go back to page fifty-five, or twenty, even. But then every once in a while, I feel the need to go to page one again and start rewriting.”
—Joan Didion
“Books aren’t written—they’re rewritten. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn’t quite done it.”
—Michael Crichton
“Don’t keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn’t setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.”
— Alastair Reynolds
“I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever written. My pencils outlast their erasers.”
—Vladimir Nabokov
“Artistry is important. Skill, hard work, rewriting, editing, and careful, careful craft: All of these are necessary. These are what separate the beginners from experienced artists.”
—Sarah Kay
“Writing is rewriting.”
—John Updike
“I’m not a very good writer, but I’m an excellent rewriter.”
—James Michener
“Allen Ginsberg instructs: ‘First thought, best thought.’ Oh, to have my every spontaneous thought count as poetry! No draft after draft like a draft horse. Clayton Eshleman, laughing, said, ‘First thought best thought’ is not ‘First word best word.’ Ginsberg does rewrite. I’m sure he does.”
—Maxine Hong Kingston
“More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn’t say I have a talent that’s special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.”
—John Irving
“Oh, I do a tremendous amount of rewriting. I just obsessively rewrite. Although sometimes there are sections, sometimes you’re just lucky and a paragraph will just kind of come out. And that’s great. But that’s not ordinary in a day’s work.”
—Elizabeth Strout
“Rewriting isn’t just about dialogue; it’s the order of the scenes, how you finish a scene, how you get into a scene.”
—Tom Stoppard
“For me, most writing consists of siphoning out useless pre-story matter, cutting and cutting and cutting, what seems to be endless rewriting, and what is entailed in all that is patience, and waiting, and false starts, and dead ends, and really, in a way, nerve.”
—Deborah Eisenberg
“The more you leave out, the more you highlight what you leave in.”
—Henry Green
“I’m not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don’t always know what I’m feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot—like it’s coming from somewhere else.”
—Theresa Rebeck
“I work hard, I work very hard. All the books at least 30 revisions.”
—Ha Jin
“That’s the magic of revisions – every cut is necessary, and every cut hurts, but something new always grows.”
—Kelly Barnhill
“I would write a book, or a short story, at least three times–once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.”
—Bernard Malamud
“Among the questions that writers need to ask themselves in the process of revision: Is this the best word I can find? Is my meaning clear? Can a word or phrase be cut from this without sacrificing anything essential? Perhaps the most important question is: Is this grammatical?”
—Francine Prose
“Given the initial talent … writing is largely a matter of application and hard work, of writing and rewriting endlessly, until you are satisfied that you have said what you want to say as clearly and simply as possible. For me, that usually means many, many revisions.”
—Rachel Carson
“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 the dark.”
—V.S. Watson
“When you print out your manuscript and read it, marking up with a pen, it sometimes feels like a criminal returning to the scene of a crime…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.”
—Don Roff
“Writing is rewriting. A writer must learn to deepen characters, trim writing, intensify scenes. To fall in love with the first draft to the point where one cannot change it is to greatly enhance the prospects of never publishing.”
—Richard North Patterson
“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
“Read over your compositions and, when you meet a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
—Samuel Johnson
“I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.”
—Truman Capote
“There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred are there. Only you don’t see them.”
—Elie Wiesel
“I’m a rewriter. That’s the part I like best…once I have a pile of paper to work with, it’s like having the pieces of a puzzle. I just have to put the pieces together to make a picture.”
—Judy Blume
“The difference between the right and the nearly right word is the same as that between lightning and the lightning bug.”
—Mark Twain
“If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
—Elmore Leonard
This post originally appeared on Career Authors