Life & Wisdom Quote by Alan Dean Foster

A working writer admitting he’d rather be a reader is both a confession and a quiet flex. Alan Dean Foster frames rewriting not as discipline-versus-laziness but as an attention problem: once the plot is “known,” the dopamine is gone. That’s a revealing tell from a career built on momentum-heavy storytelling, the kind that thrives on forward motion, discovery, and the pleasure of what happens next. Revision, by contrast, is the unglamorous art of caring about what happens again.

The line “I already know the story” does double duty. On the surface, it’s a practical complaint about process. Underneath, it exposes the fundamental asymmetry between drafting and rewriting: drafting is exploratory, rewriting is custodial. Foster positions himself as someone whose creative engine runs on novelty, the same itch that drives genre fiction’s relentless propulsion. His boredom isn’t just impatience; it’s an aesthetic preference. He wants the page to surprise him, and revision is built to reduce surprise in favor of clarity, coherence, and control.

There’s also an implicit argument against the sanctification of revision culture, the workshop dogma that greatness is forged in endless drafts. Foster doesn’t deny rewriting’s value; he admits it’s hard because it runs against his temperament. The subtext is a pragmatic professionalism: if you can’t romanticize revision, you still have to negotiate with it. The punchline lands because it’s slightly heretical: the writer’s dream is new books, even when he’s the one who has to make them.