Mai trebuie să îți spunem cât de tare ne place și cât de importantă este pentru noi partea de rescriere? Da, mai trebuie să îți spunem și o vom face mult și bine de acum încolo. Începem cursurile la școala de scriitură, așa că e normal să îți tot repetăm că trebuie să rescrii, să rescrii, să rescrii.
Și până începem cursurile, pe 5 ianuarie, îi lăsăm și pe alții să îți spună cum stă treaba cu rescrierea și de ce e important să rescrii și tu. Azi am adunat aici 26 citate de la autori faimoși, care își rescriu de fiecare dată manuscrisele și care îți recomandă să faci și tu la fel.
Michael Crichton: Books are not 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.
Harry Shaw: There is no such thing as good writing. There is only good rewriting. Those unwilling to revise and rewrite are skipping a major step toward becoming better writers.
Patricia Fuller: Writing without revising is the literary equivalent of waltzing gaily out of the house in your underwear.
James Thurber: My wife took a look at a first version of my book and said, ‘That’s high school stuff.’ I had to tell her to wait until the seventh draft.
Thornton Wilder: There are passages in every novel whose first writing is the last. But it’s the joint and cement between those passages that take a great deal of rewriting.
Richard Cormier: The beautiful part of writing is that you don’t have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon.
Roald Dahl: By the time I am nearing the end of a story, the first part will have been reread and altered and corrected at least one hundred and fifty times. I am suspicious of both facility and speed. Good writing is essentially rewriting. I am positive of this.
Dorothy Parker: 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. I can’t write five words but that I can change seven.
Truman Capote: I’m all for the scissors. I believe more in the scissors than I do in the pencil.
David Sedaris: You need to do the best that you can do, and then you need to take the best that you can do, and you need to rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it, and rewrite it.
William Zinsser: Rewriting is the essence of writing well – where the game is won or lost.
Francine Prose: 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?
Vladimir Nabokov: I have rewritten–often several times–every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.
Mark Twain: Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
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.
Colette: Put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
Larry L. King: Write. Rewrite. When not writing or rewriting, read. I know of no shortcuts.
Stephen King: When your story is ready for rewrite, cut it to the bone. Get rid of every ounce of excess fat. This is going to hurt; revising a story down to the bare essentials is always a little like murdering children, but it must be done. Formula: 2nd Draft = 1st Draft – 10%. Good luck.
John Irving: 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. And I think what I’ve always recognized about writing is that I don’t put much value in so-called inspiration. The value is in how many times you can redo something.
Elie Wiesel: 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.
Laurie Halse Andreson: Revision means throwing out the boring crap and making what’s left sound natural.
Neil Gaiman: The best advice I can give on this is, once it’s done, to put it away until you can read it with new eyes. Finish the short story, print it out, then put it in a drawer and write other things. When you’re ready, pick it up and read it, as if you’ve never read it before. If there are things you aren’t satisfied with as a reader, go in and fix them as a writer: that’s revision.
E. B. White: It is no sign of weakness or defeat that your manuscript ends up in need of major surgery. This is common in all writing and among the best of writers.
Will Self: Don’t look back until you’ve written an entire draft, just begin each day from the last sentence you wrote the preceding 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.
Isaac B. Singer: The waste paper basket is the writer’s best friend.
Gloria T. Delamar: Only amateurs don’t rewrite. It’s in the rewriting that writers bring ALL their knowledge – basic craft, technique, style, organization, attitude, creative inspiration – to the work.