Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure. — Oliver Herford
Never be satisfied with a first draft. In fact, never be satisfied with your own stuff at all, until you're certain it's as good as your finite powers can enable it to be. — Rose Tremain
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. — H. G. Wells
Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period. — Nicholas Sparks
Drafting is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge.The closer you get to the end, the more you start to worry about the beginning. — Peter James
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen. — Lee Iacocca
Sure God created man before woman, but then again you always make a rough draft before creating the final masterpiece. — Robert Bloch
You may choose to write. your top-level goal in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil. — Angela Duckworth
Dreaming and hoping won't produce a piece of work; only writing, rewriting and rewriting (if necessary)- a devoted translation of thoughts and dreams into words on paper will result in a story. — Roberta Gellis
The first thing the secretary types is the boss. — Donald Trump
The first thing the secretary types is the boss. — Unknown
Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire. — Napoleon Hill
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. — Helen Dunmore
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel. — Dmitri Shostakovich
Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. — Stephen King
Short First Draft Quotes
Architecture is like writing. You have to edit it over and over so it looks effortless — Zaha Hadid
I always start writing with a clean piece of paper and a dirty mind. — Patrick Dennis
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. — Sylvia Plath
The future is unwritten. — Joe Strummer
Writing is 1 percent inspiration, and 99 percent elimination. — Louise Brooks
Cut the ending. Revise the script. The man of her dreams is a girl. — Julie Anne Peters
Never begin the day until it is finished on paper. — Jim Rohn
Ideas aren't magical; the only tricky part is holding on to one long enough to get it written down. — Lynn Abbey
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. — E. L. Doctorow
Survive first. Figure out crayon drawing of destiny later. — Rick Riordan
First Draft Image Quotes
The first and greatest victory is to conquer yourself.
Draft Quotes
You can use an eraser on the drafting table or a sledge hammer on the construction site. — Frank Lloyd Wright
Put down the pen someone else gave you.
No one ever drafted a life worth living on borrowed ink. — Jack Kerouac
An architect's most useful tools are an eraser at the drafting board, and a wrecking bar at the site. — Frank Lloyd Wright
You have to be odd to be number one.
I was drafted and went to Korea where I had an opportunity to create a production team that did dramatic and comedy shows. I had also done a little disc jockeying. — Casey Kasem
I want to warn anyone who sees the Peace Corps as an alternative to the draft that life may well be easier at Fort Dix or at apost in Germany than it will be with us. — Sargent Shriver
I bear solemn witness to the fact that NATO heads of state and of government meet only to go through the tedious motions of reading speeches, drafted by others, with the principal objective of not rocking the boat. — Pierre Trudeau
Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure you are not, in fact, surrounded by assholes.
I would not look to the United States Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012. — Ruth Bader Ginsburg
News is only the first rough draft of history. — Alan Barth
Human rights are inscribed in the hearts of people; they were there long before lawmakers drafted their first proclamation. — Mary Robinson
Literature that keeps employing new linguistic and formal modes of expression to draft a panorama of society as a whole while at the same time exposing it, tearing the masks from its face - for me that would be deserving of an award. — Elfriede Jelinek
Draft Day Quotes
Don't look back until you've written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceeding day. This prevents those cringing feelings, and means that you have a substantial body of work before you get down to the real work which is all in . . . The edit. — Will Self
Happiness is seeing your son drafted the same day he's been accepted to an expensive college. — Johnny Carson
I ended up getting drafted by the Colorado Rockies on June 8, 2010 and the next day, my dad passed away, in June 9, 2010. So I'm at the biggest high of my life on June 8th. And the next day, June 9th, he's gone. — Russell Wilson
First think, second believe, third dream and finally dare.
It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on. — Peter Carey
I calculated that if I wrote five pages a day, which seemed very doable, I would have an 1,800-page first draft when the deadline rolled around. Though completely unwritten, I was very impressed with how long my first draft would be. — Michael Showalter
H.P. Lovecraft is for the summer between junior and senior years in high school. Cosmic fear hits you about then anyway -- you realize you'll soon have to Get a Real Job or Go To College or Both and in those days, Be Drafted. A dose of Cthulhu helps put these feelings in perspective. — Howard Waldrop
I expected to get drafted. I knew that I wouldn't get drafted on that first day due to the fact that not a lot of people had the opportunity to see me play much. — Nick Ferguson
I spent two months on the first draft, working 8 hours a day, five days a week. — George Stephen
Boy, I'll tell you, when the Rams drafted me No. 1, it surprised me. I was walking on air for days. — Jack Youngblood
I remember the day I found out my draft status. I was really floored and kind of staggered around in a daze. It just hadn't occurred to me that I could end up in Vietnam. — Parker Stevenson
Rough Drafts Quotes
Our mission is to speak the truth to power. We send home that first rough draft of history. We can and do make a difference in exposing the horrors of war and especially the atrocities that befall civilians. — Marie Colvin
Snooki is a bestselling author? Huh? What? I don't know if I should dumb down my book, shoot myself or find a publisher who'll settle for a rough draft written on a Pop-Tart and a coconut lotion handie. — Geoffrey Hill
I write a very rough first draft of every chapter, then I rewrite every chapter. I try to get it down in the first rewrite, but some chapters I can't get quite right the third time. There are some I go over and over and over again. — Robert Stone
The dictionary is, however, only a rough draft. — Monique Wittig
But it isn’t a rough draft either. The one I turned in several months ago was rough. There were some bad plot holes, some logical inconsistencies, pacing problems, and not nearly enough lesbian unicorns. — Patrick Rothfuss
We go through, I think, six different drafts of each script. And then my shooting it is roughly, you know, fifteen percent of the total work that gets done on a show. Then it's all post-production animation after that. — Steve Burns
[News is] a first rough draft of history. — Sayings
My mom was sarcastic about men. She would tell me Adam was the rough draft and Eve was the final product. She was a feminist minister, an earth mom who wore a bra only on Sundays. — Daphne Zuniga
It also signals to me, when I pick up a pencil, that this is a rough draft. This is not going anywhere, and no one's going to see it. You have permission to make all the mistakes you want. It signals freedom to me, and it signals mistakes. — Lily King
[On journalists:] We are a noisy, imperfect lot, struggling to scribble what has been called the first draft of history. — Maureen Dowd
Fox came to us with the concept for ICE AGE and they came to us with the first draft of the script. They also gave us a mandate to make it into a comedy from what was previously a rather dramatic action concept. — Chris Wedge
Writing a first draft is like groping one's way into a dark room, or overhearing a faint conversation, or telling a joke whose punchline you've forgotten. As someone said, one writes mainly to rewrite, for rewriting and revising are how one's mind comes to inhabit the material fully. — Ted Solotaroff
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
In the NFL you get one first-round draft pick if you're lucky. You couldn't really outwork anybody else. In college I could recruit ten players with first-round talent every year. — Nick Saban
Outlawing religion form the political arena is not what the Founding Fathers intended when they drafted the First Amendment. We do a grave disservice to our country by removing the influence of religion. If you separate God from the public arena, inevitably you separate good from our government. — Bill Bright
The problem is once you've written the opening paragraph and worked out how the rest of the story will go in your head, there's nothing in it for you. I write in longhand using disposable fountain pens on the right-hand side of the notebook for the first draft, then I rewrite some of the sentences and paragraphs on the left-hand side. — 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 have to write a first draft with a fountain pen before I type it up as a second. — Colm Toibin
It is better to write a bad first draft than to write no first draft at all. — Will Shetterly
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
When I'm my own editor, there's very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes. — Len Wein
All the revision in the world will not save a bad first draft: for the architecture of the thing comes, or fails to come, in the first conception, and revision only affects the detail and ornament, alas! — T. E. Lawrence
Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing. — Bernard Malamud
The first draft is just a skeleton-just bare bones. It's like the very first rehearsal of a play, where the director moves the actors around mechanically to get a feel of the action. — Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
Drafting a constitution is only the first step. The constitution has to be granted legitimacy by open discussion and a fair, representative referendum. — Emma Bonino
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on paper. What I’ve learned to do when I sit down to work on a shitty first draft is to quiet the voices in my head. — Anne Lamott
The Opera is obviously the first draft of a fine spectacle; it suggests the idea of one. — Jean De La Bruyere
For me the writing, when I'm going to direct it myself, is really just the first draft, and I don't change it very much; I only change it on average about two lines per movie. — John Sayles
Writing a first draft is like trying to build a house in a strong wind. — William Faulkner
Journalism is merely history's first draft. — Geoffrey Ward
The first draft you're pretty much on your own, so I love that. I can let my imagination go wild. I just go crazy. Then, over the years - it takes years to write these things, to make these things come to pass - there are many, many, many drafts. For Maleficent, there were at least 15. — Linda Woolverton
I write first drafts with only the good angel on my shoulder, the voice that approves of everything I write. This voice does'nt ask questions like, Is this good? Is this a poem? Are you a poet? I keep this voice at a distance, letting only the good angel whisper to me: Trust yourself. You can't worry a poem into existence. — Georgia Heard
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
Generally I finish a first draft in 2-6 months, then I set it aside for a while so that when I come back to it I can read it with fresh eyes and figure out how to improve it. — Margaret Haddix
I certainly wanted to write a book that was honest about New Orleans without explaining it to death, so much so that the first draft contained references absolutely incomprehensible to anyone who hasn't lived here for several years. — Poppy Z. Brite
I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft. — Nora Roberts
The first thing I noticed about him was that he was born the same year I was drafted. ... That's a pretty scary thought. — Al MacInnis
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
Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't. — William Zinsser
People say I'll be drafted in the first round, maybe even higher. — Craig Heyward
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
When I was first drafted, I was just happy that any team wanted to take me, but it was the Red Wings, and that made it better. — Henrik Zetterberg
It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven. — Dorothy Parker
Cooper was my road roommate, and also happened to be the first African American player drafted by a National Basketball Association team. — Bob Cousy
I was a pitcher, shortstop and outfielder, and the Yankees tried to sign me out of high school as a first-round draft pick in 1981. I turned them down to go to college. — Bo Jackson
In Conclusion
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