5 Quotes on Editing That Will Always Be Relevant

During January of our “Now What?” Months, we’re here to give you some inspiration and resources as you dive into those daunting edits on your novel. While we usually share lots of advice with you from contemporary authors, sometimes it’s nice to take a look back through history and realize that editing problems have always been the same:

1. James Baldwin

“Rewriting [is] very painful. You know it’s finished when you can’t do anything more to it, though it’s never exactly the way you want it… The hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. You have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn’t know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.” 

2. Octavia Butler

“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then gradually you get better at it. That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistence.”

3. Susan Sontag

“I don’t write easily or rapidly. My first draft usually has only a few elements worth keeping. I have to find what those are and build from them and throw out what doesn’t work, or what simply is not alive.”

4. Chaim Potok

“I think the hardest part of writing is revising. And by that I mean the following: A novelist has to create the piece of marble and then chip away to find the figure in it.”

5. Kurt Vonnegut

“Your eloquence should be the servant of the ideas in your head. Your rule might be this: If a sentence, no matter how excellent, does not illuminate your subject in some new and useful way, scratch it out.”