Editing Quotes

“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 they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author’s mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, ‘Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?’. Monet would be ripping his hair out.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“A good editor doesn't rewrite words, she rewires synapses.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“... 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, chop them, erase them, pulverise them and start again. Don't whine when things are not going your way, because they are going the right way for The Book, which is more important. The show must go on, and so must The Book.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri

“Self editing is the path to the dark side. Self editing leads to self delusion, self delusion leads to missed mistakes, missed mistakes lead to bad reviews. Bad reviews are the tools of the dark side.”
― Eric T. Benoit

“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, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“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.”
― Richard B. Knight

“I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.”
― Libba Bray

“Editing is the very edge of your knowledge forced to grow--a test you can't cheat on.”
― S. Kelley Harrell

“It was a miracle to me, this transformation of my acorns into an oak.”
― Betsy Lerner, The Forest for the Trees

“The editing process is your opportunity to catch human errors, rethink your choices, and decide what to keep, revise, or let go. Make sure your writing clearly communicates your intent.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“There is a kind of gaping admiration that would fain roll Shakespeare and Bacon into one, to have a bigger thing to gape at; and a class of men who cannot edit one author without disparaging all others.”
― Robert Louis Stevenson, Edinburgh: Picturesque Notes

“Let your thoughts spill onto the page in their raw form, then revise and refine.”
― Suman Pokhrel

“I'd known since girlhood that I wanted to be a book editor. By high school, I'd pore over the acknowledgments section of novels I loved, daydreaming that someday a brilliant talent might see me as the person who 'made her book possible' or 'enhanced every page with editorial wisdom and insight.' Could I be the Maxwell Perkins to some future Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Wolfe?”
― Bridie Clark, Because She Can

“I work in my study, taking the collections of words that people send me and making small adjustments to them, changing something here and there, checking everything is in order and putting a part of myself into the text by introducing just a little bit of difference. ("Substitutions")”
― Michael Marshall Smith, Best New Horror 22

“On the Hunger Games Fan Race fail and the portrayal of POC in fantasy literature:
It is as if the POC in the text are walking around with a great big red sign over them for some editors and it reads I AM NOT A REAL CHARACTER. I AM A PROBLEM YOU MUST DEAL WITH. The white characters are permitted to saunter about with their physical descriptions hanging out all over the place, but best not make mention of dark skin or woolly/curly hair or dark eyes (Unless, of course, that character is white. None of my white-skinned dark-eyed characters had any problem being described as such. And I’m pretty sure that Sól’s curly hair never gave anyone a single pause for thought.) As I said, I understand the desire not to define a POC simply by their physical attributes, and I understand cutting physical descriptions if no other character is described physically – but pussyfooting about in this manner with POC is doing nothing but white wash the characters themselves. It’s already much too hard to get readers to latch onto the fact that some characters may not be caucasian, why must we dance about their physical description as if it were some kind of shameful dirty little secret. You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of the way homosexuality used to only ever be hinted at in texts. It was up to the reader to ‘read between the lines’ or ‘its there if you look for it’ and all that total bullshit which used to be the norm.”
― Celine Kiernan

“The thing you don't realize, my dear girl, is that I have been forced by the economic realities to start taking publishing very seriously. For example, it has been brought to my attention that our ability to continue to pay the hordes of people employed by M&S (God knows how many mouths have to be fed) depends directly on the number of copies of your new book [Life Before Man] that we are able to sell between September and Christmas. In past I have been able to treat this whole thing as a fun game. I have never been troubled by the cavalier explanations about lost manuscripts and fuck-ups of various sorts. Now I have learned that this is a deadly serious game. I don't laugh at jokes about the Canadian postal service. I cry. (in a letter to author Margaret Atwood, dated February, 1979)”
― Jack McClelland, Imagining Canadian Literature: The Selected Letters

“Connie's other job was proof-editing which she did very badly. Transferring the author's corrections to a clean sheet of proofs was something Connie was unable to do without missing an average of three corrections a page, or transcribing newly inserted material all wrong... she put angry authors' letters about the mutilation of their books under the cushion of her chair to deal with later”
― Muriel Spark, A Far Cry from Kensington

“If each piece is approached as our life's defining work, we revise and overwrite endlessly, aiming for the unrealistic ideal of perfection.”
― Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

“Everything, indeed, in a work of art should be unedited,--and even the words, by the manner of grouping them, of shaping them to new meanings,--and one often regrets having an alphabet familiar to too many half-lettered persons.”
― Remy de Gourmont, The Book of Masks

“So it goes, shot by shot and line by line through a 140-minute concert. And no one raises an eyebrow, no one thinks it's unusual. The people in this room will work all night and not hesitate to argue over a camera angle or guitar mix until the sun returns to the Sydney sky.”
― Bill Flanagan, U2 at the End of the World

“It's as if somebody has copied and pasted Yuka Ito into a different document and then edited her, like a human game of Spot the Difference.”
― Holly Smale, Forever Geek

“Editing can feel incredibly burdensome for self-published authors when you are tasked to reread your work, for what feels like, a thousand times. Because even with your sharp attention to detail, typos can still go unnoticed. My recommendation is to hire a professional editor to go over your writings as well. There are a plethora of freelancers who are highly skilled at ensuring your work is done with precision and more ease.”
― Robin S. Baker

“There's a visceral buzz that comes from removing an unnecessary sentence from a draft. In its absence, everything else is crisper, starker, more alive. In writing, these removals were a form of rigor. But in life, they felt like cruelty.”
― Leslie Jamison, Splinters

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“I have already made this paper too long, for which I must crave pardon, not having now time to make it shorter.”
― Benjamin Franklin

“You had to be willing to admit that you were capable of missing something or you would not catch what you missed.”
― Mary Norris, Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

“Cut everything that doesn’t serve the story. Precision in writing transforms a scene from good to gripping, ensuring that every word earns its place on the page.”
― Christine DeSmet

“High end retouching isn’t about changing reality, it’s about presenting it at its best refined, professional, unforgettable.”
― Zarihs Zoltan

“Let the dreamer write the first draft. Let the perfectionist do the rest.”
― Darnell Lamont Walker

“If you're a researcher on this book thing and you were on Earth, you must have been gathering material on it."
"Well, I was able to extend the original entry a bit, yes."
"Let me see what it says in this edition, then. I've got to see it."
... "What? Harmless! Is that all it's got to say? Harmless! One word! ... Well, for God's sake I hope you managed to rectify that a bit."
"Oh yes, well I managed to transmit a new entry off to the editor. He had to trim it a bit, but it's still an improvement."
"And what does it say now?" asked Arthur.
"Mostly harmless," admitted Ford with a slightly embarrassed cough.”
― Douglas Adams , The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy