I write an actual script rather quickly - a draft will take me two weeks - but I write a lot of drafts. My big thing is I don't re-read. When I write, I never re-read back. I'll send it, because if I re-read back, it will cripple me.
Abi Morgan
I start a lot of things and purposely leave them unfinished. When I have a bunch of really long emails, and I need time to think about the response, I'll actually start replying, leave them as drafts, and move onto something else mid-sentence.
Adam Grant
I'm pretty obsessive-compulsive, and I'm very fast. I tend to not write for a long period of time until I can't not write, and then I write first drafts in gallops. I won't eat right. I forget to do my laundry.
Adam Rapp
Perhaps it is because I'm a writer trained in history that I've always assumed I would make mistakes in my drafts. Historians know how faulty human memory can be.
Alice Dreger
Usually with something like 'The 100,' because you're working so much and every day, and they'll change the drafts quite quickly, we'll go through maybe, like, 12 different versions of the same scene over a week. So there is no point in learning it on a Tuesday when on a Thursday it might be completely different.
Alycia Debnam-Carey
Architect. One who drafts a plan of your house, and plans a draft of your money.
Ambrose Bierce
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
Andrea Barrett
When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.
Andrew Davies
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
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
I write with a Uni-Ball Onyx Micropoint on nine-by-seven bound notebooks made by a Canadian company called Blueline. After I do a few drafts, I type up the poem on a Macintosh G3 and then send it out the door.
Billy Collins
I don't sit down and write a song, and then slam down the phone like, 'We got another one!' and pop some champagne. It's like if someone's writing a novel: You write a series of drafts.
Black Thought
I can get really obsessive. I like writing many drafts, and I try not to because it is very time-consuming, especially when you're working on a novel. But I do like to take a story and reorder it, put things in different places. This allows me to see things in a new and sometimes surprising way.
Carol Windley
The drafts which true genius draws upon posterity, although they may not always be honored so soon as they are due, are sure to be paid with compound interest in the end.
Charles Caleb Colton
When I started 'Still Missing,' I had a few key plot points in mind, which I played around with mentally for a couple of months, then one day I just started writing. Not having an outline led to some cool plot twists, but also many rewrites! A lot of the plotting happened on subsequent drafts.
Chevy Stevens
I worked as a draftsman for the Department of Environmental Protection, and as a teacher, in N.Y.C.; at a big bank and a small ad agency, a tiny law firm and a few giant ones; as a cashier and a dishwasher; preparing deli sandwiches and stringing tennis racquets and pruning evergreens into conical Christmas-tree shapes.
Chris Pavone
My only writing ritual is to shave my head bald between writing the first and second drafts of a book. If I can throw away all my hair, then I have the freedom to trash any part of the book on the next rewrite.
Chuck Palahniuk
I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.
Clifford Geertz
Once I've got the first draft down on paper then I do five or six more drafts, the last two of which will be polishing drafts. The ones in between will flesh out the characters and maybe I'll check my research.
Colleen McCullough
I am violently untidy. My desk is overcrowded. I write my first drafts in longhand in a long notebook using a plastic throwaway fountain pen. Then I work on a word processor using a different desk and a different room.
Colm Toibin
Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.
I write first drafts by hand, often out of the house somewhere, and then, when I've got a draft, type it up and let it sit, sometimes for a long time, and then when I'm ready, I work on revision.
Once I have a book in my head, I write progressive drafts fast and obsessively and have trouble sleeping.
There's a great deal of stripping away; in early drafts, I may say the same thing two or three times, and each may be appropriate, but I try to pick the best and improve it. I work on sound a great deal, and I will change a word or two, revise punctuation and line breaks, looking for the sound I want.
I tend to write first drafts that are incredibly cognitive, very rational, very boring. They come off as justification. Like, 'This is my idea and here's all the reasons that it's right.' It doesn't make for very compelling reading.
Your spouse, a sibling, a friend need to read your drafts. They have to be people unafraid to tell you what sucks. For early feedback, that's more important than professional editorial skill. Most people know what sucks.
I don't think anything I've written has been done in under six or eight drafts. Usually it takes me a few years to write a book. 'World's Fair' was an exception. It seemed to be a particularly fluent book as it came. I did it in seven months. I think what happened in that case is that God gave me a bonus book.
When I made '1983,' there were a bunch of tracks that were in the early drafts that didn't make it because they just sounded like tracks for rappers, and that's not really the sound I look for when I produce my own albums.
By the time I was a teenager, I knew I wanted to be an artist. I was a born draftsman and liked all forms of art, so I just knew that's what I wanted to do.
We have to allow ourselves the freedom to make mistakes, including cultural mistakes, in our first drafts. I believe it's okay to get cultural details wrong in your first draft. It's okay if stereotypes emerge. It just means that your experience is limited, that you're human.
The greatest pleasure when I started making money was not buying cars or yachts but finding myself able to have as many freshly typed drafts as possible.
Obviously, drafts sometimes are good ones, or bad ones; I think you can get a good, quality player late in the lottery.
It's funny because you know the novel process: you get the drafts, you get the galley, and then you get the galley proofs. You have opportunities to change things all along. But the further along in the process you go, the more careful you have to be in making those changes, and the smaller the changes have to be.
When I am working on an epic-length book, the writing process is fairly long. It takes from four to five years to get through all the drafts. The book is done when I am exhausted.
Writing film scripts is the hardest thing in the world. A script has to go to five or six drafts, and you need the feedback of other people and to keep coming back with a fresh eye, honing it down.
I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.
I get a lot of fan mail addressed to Bilbo and sometimes Sir Bilbo - it's hardly ever addressed to Ian Holm, in fact. My business manager drafts the replies, and then I pop in to the office and sign them, 'Bilbo!'
My father worked as a mechanical draftsman at Mazagaon Docks and is a Catholic. My mum was a Muslim, so my parents broke quite a few rules to get married.
The first drafts of my novels have all been written in longhand, and then I type them up on my old electric. I have resisted getting a computer because I distrust the whole PC thing. I don't think a great book has yet been written on computer.
I kind of stay away from the mock drafts and stuff. It's hard, obviously, in this day and age with social media... so I might look at it for a quick second, but if it's not one of the 32 teams, it's not important.
Second, there were the discussions and drafts leading up to the White Paper on Employment Policy of 1944 in which the UK government accepted the maintenance of employment as an obligation of governmental policy.
In my office in Florida I have, I think, 30 manuscript piles around the room. Some are screenplays or comic books or graphic novels. Some are almost done. Some I'm rewriting. If I'm working with a co-writer, they'll usually write the first draft. And then I write subsequent drafts.
The only thing the Pop Artists had in common is that we all had been commercial artists in some manner. Lichtenstein was a draftsman; I was a billboard painter, but we didn't work together. I didn't meet Andy Warhol until 1964.
No one lives on credit in France because banks don't allow overdrafts and zero percent credit cards do not exist.
The thing about our movies is, we write thirty drafts. That's a very detailed script. Which means that if you try to crank it out week to week in television, it's impossible.
It takes a year for us to generate a script that is ready to shoot. There are maybe 20 drafts of a script. And, each time, someone saying 'I don't really love this,' we discuss it for 15 minutes.
If you can have a really good coaching staff, and you can have a really good young quarterback and do a really good job in player personnel and string together multiple successful drafts, your window is not small in the NFL because of the quarterback.
I haven't had trouble with writer's block. I think it's because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn't have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.
The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that's what gets me the best material.
I would go so far as to say that I mostly write terrible things. I mean, my first drafts are so appalling.
