To my parents and all the people who reassured me that leaving high school and going into the draft was the right thing to do, I am forever thankful.
Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.
When I asked my da how ye knew which was the right woman, he told me when the time came, I'd have no doubt. And I didn't. When I woke in the dark under that tree on the road to Leoch, with you sitting on my chest, cursing me for bleeding to death, I said to myself 'Jamie Fraser, for all ye canna see what she looks like, and for all she weights as much as a good draft horse, this is the woman.
This life isn't bad for a first draft.
I don't think you think of your audience as much as you think, when you're revising, how it holds together. I mean I think the first draft is art, and the second draft, third, fourth draft is craft. Putting it together so that it has a good pattern.
Political systems are run by self-selecting politicians. We don't draft people; it's not jury duty.
On movies, I like to involve the cast in the writing of the script. I like to have a rehearsal period, after which I do the last draft, which gives me a chance to incorporate anything the actors have come up with during the rehearsal period, so I'm very inclusive as a writer.
[On newspapers:] A first draft of history.
Journalism is the first draft of history
I draft quickly and then revise, a lot.
People who go on to be writers are those who can forgive themselves the horror of the first draft.
I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.
When only men could register to vote, we required only men to register for the draft. Today both sexes can vote, but only men must register for the draft.
January 8 has been a lucky day for me. I have started all my books on that day, and all of them have been well received by the readers. I write eight to ten hours a day until I have a first draft, then I can relax a little. I am very disciplined. I write in silence and solitude. I light a candle to call inspiration and the muses, and I surround myself with pictures of the people I love, dead and alive.
I'm against the draft. I believe we should have a professional military; it might be smaller, but it would be more effective.
I don't engage in self-censorship. But I do change everybody to have red hair in the last draft. . . . If you give people red hair when in real life they haven't got red hair, I've noticed they don't recognize themselves, anyway.
It's like standing on the edge of a cliff. This is especially true of the first draft. Every day you're making up the earth you're going to stand on.
The EU Constitution is something new in human history. Though it is not as eloquent as the French and U. S. constitutions, it is the first governing document of its kind to expand the human franchise to the level of global consciousness. The language throughout the draft constitution speaks of universalism, making it clear that its focus is not a people, or a territory, or a nation, but rather the human race and the planet we inhabit.
When I have a first draft, I have a floor under my feet that I can walk on. And then, especially with the help of the computer, rewriting is so easy to do with the computer, much easier than it used to be with the typewriter. So the books go through numerous drafts.
I start my process hand written, and then I dump it in. It's like you're getting a second draft 'cause when I put it in the computer, I fix it and change stuff. That's my process. I picked that up from speaking to Neil Gaiman and Joe Hill. I was messing around with the idea of starting to write more, writing a book and doing things like this, and I reached out for advice. They were like, "Oh, we hand write, and then we dump it all in. " I was like, "Great! There's no more blank pages. "
