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
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
You may choose to write. your top-level goal in indelible ink, but until you know for sure, work in pencil. — Angela Duckworth
Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing. — Sylvia Plath
The road to hell is paved with works-in-progress. — Philip Roth
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
Reread, rewrite, reread, rewrite. If it still doesn’t work, throw it away. — Helen Dunmore
No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else's draft. — H. G. Wells
Books aren't written - they're rewritten. Including your own. It is one of the hardest things to accept, especially after the seventh rewrite hasn't quite done it. — Michael Crichton
Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go. — E. L. Doctorow
The discipline of writing something down is the first step toward making it happen. — Lee Iacocca
What you have in your head, put down on paper. The head is a fragile vessel. — Dmitri Shostakovich
I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter. — James A. Michener
As you continue writing and rewriting, you begin to see possibilities you hadn't seen before. Writing a poem is always a process of discovery. — Robert Hayden
First Draft Quotes
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
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
Life is rough so you gotta be tough.
[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
There is peace even in the storm.
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
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
Sure God created man before woman, but then again you always make a rough draft before creating the final masterpiece. — Robert Bloch
The first draft of anything is shit.
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
It is a rough road that leads to the heights of greatness.
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
Only ambitious nonentities and hearty mediocrities exhibit their rough drafts. It's like passing around samples of sputum. — Vladimir Nabokov
Having done television for almost 20 years now, a pilot is kind of like a rough draft. It's like bringing people into your ultrasound and hooking up to the monitor and going, "Isn't my baby beautiful?" "Yeah. I can only see the outline of it, but it looks like it might be." — Matt Bomer
News is the first rough draft of history. — Philip L. Graham
I am somebody who usually writes out the rough draft in longhand. Then I type it into the computer, and that is where I do my editing. I find that if I write it on the computer, I go too quick. So I like getting that first draft out and then typing it in; you are less self-conscious about it. — Barack Obama
If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work. — Dean Koontz
Journalism is not easy. It's the first rough draft. I don't think you need to wait around until you have the definitive thing. You record what's there; don't delude yourself that this is the ultimate historical view. — Harold Evans
While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant. — Lionel Barber
It's my belief that you should never show your work to anyone in the publishing world until it shines like a diamond. Rough drafts don't shine, as a rule. Mine certainly didn't. That's why I was rejected for years and years. — Patrick Rothfuss
After finishing a draft, no matter how rough, I almost always put it aside for a while. It doesn't matter if it's a story or a novel, I find that when it's still fresh in my mind I'm either thoroughly sick of its flaws or completely blind to them. Either way, I'm unable to make substantive edits of any value. — Leslie Jamison
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
Each of my books took roughly one and a half years to write. Some may have taken a shorter time to write the draft and a longer time to revise, while others were the opposite. — Alex Flinn
Because your goal is a complete rough draft of a novel, and every rough draft, by being complete, is perfect. — Jane Smiley
Why was man created before woman? Because you always need a rough draft before the final copy.” – Chloe Traeger — Jill Shalvis
In Conclusion
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