Top 60 Drafts Quotes

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.

‘An Education’ was a complicated piece of work because it came from a tiny essay, so it took me a while to find the story I wanted to tell and the characters I wanted to tell it about. That really only emerged after four or five drafts.

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.

I keep everything in Notepad: shopping lists, to-do lists, recipe tasting notes, my blog content calendar, recipe inspiration, blog-post drafts.

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.

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.

I’m a great reviser. I do these reckless drafts just to get the lay of the land.

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.

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.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.

It’s a debilitating process, working with the studios. With the length of time it takes for drafts and development deals, your enthusiasm is gone before you’re ready to make the film.

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.

My first drafts are always terrible, and I hate them, but the process for me is all about writing the bad version until it tells you what the good version is. And then you write that.

One of the things I noticed more in this draft than in any recent drafts was the importance of the character issue. Players who had baggage, like Justice, fell much farther than his talent dictated. But a lot of coaches didn’t want to take the chance.

During my first eight years at the Revs we drafted really well, but I got very little from the last two drafts that I took part in.

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.

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’ve always wanted to make it to the NBA and be on a team, so whatever team drafts me I’m going to be happy with.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don’t know any of these writers.

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.

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 think a lot of the dull parts of first drafts come from a kind of over-managing, intrusive writer who wants to direct traffic. The idea of taking out the parts that the reader could infer is very liberating, and it’s weirdly part of radicalizing your work: it allows you to go to new places fast.

Obviously, drafts sometimes are good ones, or bad ones; I think you can get a good, quality player late in the lottery.

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.

I’m not much of an outliner in general. I tend to wing my way through all my drafts, which means writing a series is a very chaotic and panic-inducing experience.

I am a hopeless pantser, so I don’t do much outlining. A thought will occur to me, and I’ll just throw it into the story. I tell myself I’ll worry about untangling it later. I’m glad no one sees my first drafts except for my poor editor and agent.

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.

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.

The bottom line is that I like my first drafts to be blind, unconscious, messy efforts; that’s what gets me the best material.

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.

I’m pretty rigorous about the drafts I turn in. I don’t turn in something that’s so ungodly they go, ‘What the hell is this?’

It’s always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that’s something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

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.

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 hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they’d like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

I usually do about five drafts per rhyme for each song.

Good first drafts and speedy responses to consumer dialog will always trump lawyered corporate speak.

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.

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.

I am such a rewriter; I have so many notebooks filled with drafts you wouldn’t believe.

On the last drafts, I focus on the words themselves, including the rub of vowels and consonants, stressed and unstressed syllables. Yet even at this stage I’m often surprised. A different ending or a new character shows up and I’m back to where I began, letting the story happen, just trying to stay out of the way.

I wasn’t involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.

I have to re-write a lot. I couldn’t tell you how many drafts I write, but I know I’ve done at least twenty rewrites on each book.

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.

I try to write everyday. I do that much better over here than when I’m teaching. I always rewrite, usually fairly close-on which is to say first draft, then put it aside for 24 hours then more drafts.

I’ve always preferred writing in longhand. I’ve always written first drafts in longhand.