On Cutting

as a Religion

Too many writers see cutting as the solution to all problems.

They sit in workshops and advise one another to cut this, cut that, cut generally.

They internalise cut cut and cut again as the best wisdom.

Adverbs bad.

Cut adverbs.

Some of this comes out of inherited machismo — of being influenced, and perhaps oppressed, and perhaps even killed off, by the lineage of Ernest Hemingway, Raymond Carver/Gordon Lish, Elmore Leonard, Chuck Palahniuk.

The words of praise for this style would be pared back, honed, stripped bare.

All suggesting knives, if not machetes.

Implicitly, this US cutting crew seem to figure writing as wildness, as a burgeoning and threatening jungle that constantly needs to be hacked at, if you want to make a path through.

I am not against cutting.

It’s fair to observe that really good writers — by definition — will cut really good or, at least, almost really good writing.

You will ever only be as good a writer as the best of the words you cut.

That’s the level above which your made-public writing exists, so there must be something just below that, and below that — in penultimate drafts, in forgotten notebooks.

But I think it’s dangerous for writers who are just beginning, or who haven’t yet got much of themselves on paper, to think that the way they’ll make something of themselves is by carving up what’s hardly had the chance to come into existence.

This is more like attacking a pot plant from IKEA than going at a vast jungle.

What you’re going to end up with is a dead stump, not a living thing possessing enough leaves to absorb light and grow.

At the beginning, it’s better to write as much as possible, as growingly as possible, and to make yourself a patch of jungle.

(I mean at the beginning of a piece of writing just as much as at the beginning of a writing life.)

Pruning can be fine, when the IKEA plant is established enough to thrive afterwards. But there’s no point snipping bits off the leaves of one shrub, to make them into the shape of another.

It’s no good cutting for cutting’s sake.

Better to let your own weird leaves grow, one after another, then figure out what the whole mess is saying to you.

Part of the macho approach — and this is linked to all these writers being American — is that they’re so sure of having a subject.

They have a different sense of space. This affects everything, from how they use the word and to what their characters expect of life.

Of course, there is a wild continent to be subdued.

The vastness of their subject may terrify but it also energises them.

They’ve got the jungle of their life experience to chop into shape, though it’s not going to end up as topiary.

For many of us, though — if we’re more timid, non-American sorts — that assumption and confidence just isn’t there. Certainly not to start with.

I was born and grew up in Mid-Bedfordshire.

Which writer, since John Bunyan, had come from Bedfordshire?

Who had ever written anything good — or anything at all — about Bedford? About Ampthill, the village where I lived?

I tried to write about the place in a pared back, honed way, but ended up with nothing but shavings.

Instead, I turned to fantasy fiction — a literature of always wanting to be somewhere other than where you actually are.

A way of getting unstuck.

I went to university and read and read.

Then I moved to Prague, and wrote about people living there.

It was only when eventually I started writing about a group of characters who were doing their very best to ignore the fact they were living in the present, in Bedford, and pretend instead that they were in pre-1966 America — it was only when I acknowledged and included what had been stopping me writing as myself that I was able to write anything at all.

This was my first published novel, Beatniks.

In a comic way, I was able to have a reckoning with the oppressive force of macho American writing, but I was taking not Hemingway & Co. but Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady, and Allen Ginsberg. My allies were Carolyn Cassady, Diane Di Prima and Joyce Johnson.

All of us united against cutting as a religion.

This is the Hemingway Handmade Damascus Steel Pocket Knife by Forseti Steel. Image credit.