A Quote by Tracy Kidder

Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.

Tracy Kidder

Quote Topics

Prose Revision Work Writing

Quote Author

Tracy Kidder
American - Author
Born: November 12, 1945

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.

George Carlin

A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose.

Samuel McChord Crothers

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.

Ellen Hunnicutt

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.

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Somewhere I put it this way: first drafts are for learning what one’s fiction wants him to say. Revision works with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it. Revision is one of the exquisite pleasures of writing.

Bernard Malamud

Students need to be reminded that revision isn't merely making a few cosmetic changes. Revision is seeing and then reseeing our words and practicing strategies that make a difference in our writing.

Georgia Heard

There's a perception that good writing is writing which runs smoothly. But smooth-running prose can work against what you're trying to express in a novel.

Katie Kitamura

So much of the effort that goes into writing prose for me is about making sentences that capture the music that I'm hearing in my head. It takes a lot of work, writing, writing, and rewriting to get the music exactly the way you want it to be.

Jonathan Lethem

In high school, in 1956, at the age of sixteen, we were not taught "creative writing." We were taught literature and grammar. So no one ever told me I couldn't write both prose and poetry, and I started out writing all the things I still write: poetry, prose fiction - which took me longer to get published - and non-fiction prose.

Margaret Atwood

I love writing prose. I really love writing prose. It's very pleasurable for me.

Marjorie Liu

I do love writing prose interspersed with the poetry of other people. Their rhythms break into my prose and create a connection.

Pattiann Rogers

My object when writing prose is to write as clearly as possible. I think I know what I'm saying in prose, and I want others to understand it and to be able to restate it.

Pattiann Rogers

If there is anything unique about my writing it is the way that I combine poetry and prose, not just on the level of having a poem here, prose there, but that it really is a true amalgam.

Richard Grossman

I used to write sonnets and various things, and moved from there into writing prose, which, incidentally, is a lot more interesting than poetry, including the rhythms of prose.

Shelby Foote

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.