A Quote by Jamaica Kincaid
I write a lot in my head. The revision goes on internally. It's not spontaneous and it doesn't have a schedule.
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I don't have a schedule, but I can write for hours non-stop. If I'm drafting a book, I try and do a chapter a day. I dislike first drafts. Revision is a lot more fun, but it takes years.
No strict schedule, but I write nearly daily in my journal. Sometimes I go back and pull out things to give to my characters and my settings in books that I write. But the books themselves are not scheduled. I work on a book when it comes to me, usually about one a year. I spend a lot of time working on it in my head. But getting it published is another matter. So, I have a lot of unpublished manuscripts.
With time some poems just fall by the wayside. Other poems get better over time with revision, revision, revision. My ladybug poem took 10 minutes to write but was 10 years in the making.
Revision plays a very large role in writing. Sometimes it seems to be all revision. And the longer I write, the more I revise-until it is completely right.
My life is constant revision but it's not revision, a lot of it is for the first time.
My approach to comedy is that whenever it comes to me, I write it. With 'The Daily Show,' you have to write stuff every day, and that's a new experience for me, to not only write on someone else's schedule but a daily schedule.
I'm a passionate believer in revision, and a lot of my writing gets done during revision process. It isn't just tweaking: I tend to break it apart and remake it every time I do a new draft.
The writing is what gives me the joy, especially editing myself for the page, and getting something ready to show to the editors, and then to have a first draft and get it back and work to fix it, I love reworking, I love editing, love love love revision, revision, revision, revision.
I think there simply comes a point at which you're beating your head against the wall with revision, when you're making something different but not better. For me, revision usually has more to do with making the language prettier, finding clearer images, using more active verbs.
Like a lot of what happens in novels, inspiration is
a sort of spontaneous combustion--the oily rags of the head and heart.
I try to write a lot and my process is kind of back and forth. I procrastinate a lot so when I do sit down to write, I'm pretty lazy at it. And it's such a frustrating thing sometimes - writing - when you don't do it all the time, you get that thing in your head that you have nothing to talk about and you can't write songs.
I'm very happy at CNBC. It's the passion, it's the movement - there's a lot of moving parts. And spontaneous TV and spontaneous debates... I don't know that there's anyone that enjoys their job more than I do.
I make up stories in my head all the time, but I've never written them down. But I write a lot of story songs. Any song I'm singing, I sort of see it like a movie in my head. That's why a lot of times I close my eyes when I'm singing.
I write a lot in my head. I've never been driven to write things down.
So, the process of revision, it's not systematic. But for me, I mean, I know a lot of poets who write out a draft and then revise it and I think they're happier people. But, I'm just not able to do it that way. I need to just continually examine it as I do it.
I'm very rigid about my schedule. I sit down at 8 A.M., and the Internet blocker goes on. My standard time is 120 minutes. I'm a compulsive writer, so it reminds me to stop writing... If I write more than that, I turn into an ogre for my kids.
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