Tom Brady is Tom Brady. He was a sixth-round draft pick. A lot of people passed up on him. He’s a Super Bowl Champion, Super Bowl MVP. He’s been in a bunch of Super Bowls, and he could care less about all of that. He just cares about winning the next game.
My experience of fiction was, in the beginning, so exploratory. I wasn’t sitting down to a desk at Yaddo with a month, thinking I have to have a draft of a novel.
I see myself as the No. 1 player in the draft, but it is what it is. You can just take it day-by-day, put in the work, and the draft is going to be the outcome of whatever the draft is.
I’m happy to be here at the NBA Draft no matter where I go.
When I’m writing a first draft of a script, I can disappear into that for two, three months exclusively.
In 2007, when I was a lawyer for the public interest group Free Press, I helped draft the complaint to the FCC against Comcast for secretly blocking BitTorrent and other technologies.
The type of athletes we draft still need types of versatility on the defense side of the ball, run the offense. You should still be concerned on the offense side of the ball.
I once read Updike after writing a first draft, and I wanted to put my own book on the fire. I’ve since learned to read utter crap while I’m writing: pulp is the thing.
Writing the first draft is like hitting the beach on D Day. You don’t stop to mourn the dead or comfort the wounded. You get off the beach because, if you don’t, you’ll die there.
I’m not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.
I don’t fiddle or edit or change while I’m going through that first draft.
I read every draft of every episode of every series produced at FX.
I think I wrote the first draft of ‘Nightmare on Elm Street’ in ’79. No one wanted to buy it. Nobody. I felt very strongly about it, so I stayed with it and kept paying my assistant and everything. At a certain point, I was literally flat broke.
It’s hard to change a roster around. You’ve got to hit your draft picks right, you’ve gotta hit free agency right, and a team’s got to fit together.
I’d get rid of it, just get rid of the draft altogether. We’d just deal with the salary cap.
Everything with the draft process, from the combine to visits to pro days, that’s great but it’s not football.
I have watched the NBA draft just about every year, so to see myself up there, that is something I am excited about.
I learned that Yao Ming broke his navicular bone like five days before the 2009 draft. From that moment on, all I thought about was going from zero stars to one star. How do you do it?
Not until the final draft do I force myself to remember that I’m going to have to think about how it will affect other people.
To be honest, after the draft, I’m always excited.
The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I’m not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it’s torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.
When I’m my own editor, there’s very little difference between the first draft and the final. I write what feels right to begin with. I rarely make any major changes.
I hated the draft, but at the same time, it’s something that made every American take war seriously.
Everything I write, I’ve written the first draft in Austria.
When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They’re like pictures of yourself in middle school. You’re embarrassed to see them.
I finished the rough draft of ‘Crying in H Mart’ in July of 2020. My editor had it for five to six months, so I was free from it for a little while. I decided to take that time to start working on a new album.
I love the draft process. I love the regular season. I love preparing for the games. I just love football.
I draft things on Twitter five or six times now, where as five, six years ago, I probably would just post and not really censor myself as much. But now I’m like, well, I don’t want to post that I ate at McDonald’s because then I’m going to get someone telling me I’m fat.
The first draft of ‘Ex Machina’ is extremely different than the finished film. That would be like 10% of the original draft stayed into the shooting script.
When you’re 20 and going to the draft, everybody is telling you what you should wear. I kind of succumbed to peer pressure on that one.
When you get a draft pick right, you should be given full credit.
I had expected that at some point during the first draft a light would go on, and I would understand, finally, how to write a book. This never happened. The process was akin to blindly walking in the dark, feeling my way only by touch, and only recognising dead ends when I smacked into them.
Write with abandon and no constraints for first draft. Cut brutally and save in separate files on second draft. Add conflict; don’t be afraid to make your characters suffer. Read what you love. Write what you love. Love.
Some writers sit down without a thought of what they are going to say, and they go through draft after draft.
I remember during the draft I went to see a lot of organizations. But after you play in New York, you don’t really want to go anywhere else. The people around are so cool.
The baseball draft is very different from the NBA or the NFL.
Unfortunately, when we had a No. 1 draft pick, there wasn’t an Andrew Luck out there. A lot of that’s pure luck.
If you’re tanking to get a higher draft pick, you really shouldn’t be playing hockey.
When I came out in the draft, people kept asking me, ‘So are you a small forward or a power forward?’ and I was like, ‘I’m a basketball player.’ Period.
LeBron had a pretty bad draft suit.
At the combine and at my workouts, I tried to be the perfect player. I tried to promote my strengths and conceal my weaknesses, and on paper, I kind of succeeded: I was the first pick in the draft. And with that, I inherited this big shiny trophy that I carried around, and it had one word engraved on it – anxiety.
Back then I said to myself ‘screw football.’ Actually I just took part in this camp as there was nothing better for me to do. They also didn’t draft me because they thought I was too wild and undisciplined.
I watched myself get drafted by myself. I walked out of my own draft party because I was a little frustrated.
I’ve been a lot of places and worked with a lot of different guys. High draft picks. Low draft picks.
I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.
I was fortunate enough to do a docu-series throughout the draft process, but I did that to show the behind-the-scenes stuff.
Do I consider the 2003 Draft class the best ever? Yes, absolutely!
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.
In the draft plan, we’re looking at recycling 20 percent of our garbage by 2010.
I’m never going to forget draft day.
The first draft often is really fast, and I’d be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it.
We just have fun with our NFL Draft coverage because we understand that it’s a long process, and there can be technical glitches that we don’t profess to ignore. During our late coverage of the Draft, we sometimes get slap-happy and distort the heads of our analysts.
I had friends around campus and great teammates. I didn’t want to leave. I didn’t expect to be regarded and scouted as such a high pick, so it was a crazy twist to reality. I’d always wanted to make the NBA. It was my dream. Then all of a sudden, people were telling me I’d be the fourth pick if I entered the draft.
Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.
I have to do draft after draft… It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.
You have to constantly work on your script if it needs it. You don’t accept, ‘Oh, I did a draft and…’ No, it’s your responsibility to work on the script as much as possible and make it better and better.
My own feeling is that one should refuse to participate in any activity that implements American aggression – thus tax refusal, draft refusal, avoidance of work that can be used by the agencies of militarism and repression, all seem to me essential.
Let me back up a little and tell you why I prefer writing to real life: You can rewrite. A novel, for example, can be cleaned up, altered, trimmed, improved. Life, on the other hand, is one big messy rough draft.
During the Vietnam era, more than 30,000 draft dodgers and deserters sought harbor in cities like Montreal and Toronto, where public opposition to the war was strong and most residents didn’t question their motives.
Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I’m a writer-rewriter. I can’t move on until I feel like it’s presentable.
I do try to deliver a solid first draft, meaning it’s my tenth or twentieth draft and then I call it ‘first’ and hand it in, much to the chagrin of the studio sometimes when they look at the contract and go, ‘You’ve passed your deadline.’
