A Quote by Maya Lin

My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar. — © Maya Lin
My grandfather, on my father's side, helped to draft one of the first constitutions of China. He was a fairly well-known scholar.
I am a technophile, so there is no such thing as a first draft. The first draft plunges on, and about a quarter of the way through it I realise I'm doing things wrong, so I start rewriting it. What you call the first draft becomes rather like a caterpillar; it is progressing fairly slowly, but there is movement up and down its whole length, the whole story is being changed. I call this draft zero, telling myself how the story is supposed to go.
With Ibrahim al-Koni, what I figured out was - and you'll see this in his novels - if your time is limited, make the unit of the chapters small so that you can finish one a day, at least in the first draft. Once you have the first draft it's living, and you can coax it to grow and trim it and reshape it and so on. But get that first draft. I think if I'd gone to an MFA program and learned that, it would have been money well spent. But translation has been that for me.
Yes, the first draft is the key. That's why I put so much energy, focus, and attention on the first draft, because I respect that first go at the story. If I don't have the key in that first draft, I invariably won't get it in subsequent drafts, though I can craft around it.
First draft: let it run. Turn all the knobs up to 11. Second draft: hell. Cut it down and cut it into shape. Third draft: comb its nose and blow its hair. I usually find that most of the book will have handed itself to me on that first draft.
I'm really familiar with what Cardboard's doing; it's not a novel concept. Cardboard is in many ways a direct ripoff of FOV2GO, a project I helped work on when I was at ICT, and it was fairly well known in the academic VR community.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.
My father was always respectful to my grandfather. I really wanted that to be known because I never saw him disrespect my grandfather, and I never saw them have a cross word.
My grandfather lived to be late 90s on one side and on the other side, 70s or something. And my father died young, at 63. But he didn't take very good care of himself.
I'm part Spanish. My paternal grandfather came from Spain via Singapore to Manila. On my mother's side it's more mixture, with a Filipino mother and a father who was Scotch Irish-French; you know, white American hybrid. And I also have on my father's side a great-great-grandmother who was Chinese. So, I'm a hybrid.
I've always known that my father's father and grandfather and grandmother were from Mexico. I've never denied it. I've always said it.
Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
My father constantly reminded me that he named me after Angela Yvonne Davis, a scholar and activist who was well known for her work in tandem with the Black Panther Party. That felt like a purposeful, beckoning call to engage in strategic resistance and to fight for the oppressed.
I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft. There will be some tweaks along the way, but it's not like I'll go 20 pages and throw it out and start again.
My parents and my grandfather on my mom's side would travel the earth. They went to Australia and China, and they went to probably every soccer game I ever played.
I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.
I know my grandfather drank occasionally socially, what we call "taking a sip." And my father never touched the bottle. He condemned my grandfather for doing that, and his punishment to his father was when my grandfather came to visit him from Georgia, he would not allow my grandfather to preach in his church.Even though my classmates very often drank alcohol in my presence and they would try and get me to join in, I felt, no, I didn't need that.
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