Posted: March 31, 2022

The Joys of Cutting

"Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short." Henry David Thoreau

Cutting as a way of revising your prose has a bad name. Movies and television present the blue pencil as something to be feared -- all those scenes of editors gleefully striking through sentences or whole paragraphs while writers watch and wince. I once had a client tell me she burst into tears when she opened my first batch of editing. (She was comforted when she saw how much her writing improved.) And there are all those writing books out there comforting you for having to "kill your babies."

But cutting has a real advantage over, say, rewriting passages or ripping up a chapter and starting from scratch. When you just cut, what emerges is not only stronger. It's the story you've been trying to write all along. The cutting just reveals it, like Michelangelo finding the statue inside the block of marble.

So what sorts of things can simply be cut? Most of you probably already know to avoid exposition. But for newcomers here, don't worry about confusing your readers. They can get to know your characters and settings gradually. And since this exposition tends to come at the beginning, cutting it will help get your readers into your plot more quickly. So if you feel like your story is getting of to a slow start, just look for blocks of backstory and exposition and start whacking away.

Don't forget your dialogue. For the most part, people don't speak in paragraphs. They often don't speak in complete sentences. So if your characters are not talking like real people, cutting may be the answer.

Lists can generally go, as well. I'm not sure when writers got in the habit of conveying a character or location through a long list of attributes, but to me it feels like you're asking your readers to do too much of the work for you. They have to find the connections between the elements on your list like it was a question on the SAT's. It is far stronger, and much harder, to choose the one or maybe two details that say what you want to say and let them stand on their own.

I suspect that lists are becoming so commonplace in fiction now that writers hardly notice when they're doing it. Elizabeth George has a long history of wonderfully-written books with sharp characters. But in her latest, Something to Hide, she tends to give in to the literary affectation of lists. For instance, consider this passage, about a young man getting a lecture from his father as they walk through their neighborhood.

Instead of taking any kind of notice of the waves of heat rising from the pavement, of the trees -- where there were any in this part of town -- losing their leaves far too early into the year, of the remaining ice in the fish stalls in Ridley Road Market melting so quickly that the air was thick with the smell of hake and snapper and mackerel, of the meat in the butchers' stalls sending forth a stench of blood from the simmering organs of sheep and cows, of the fruit and veg having to be sold at a discount before they rotted, Abeo [the father] merely strode onward in the direction of the Mayville Estate, oblivious of everything save Tani's [the son's] failure to arrive at work on time.

Besides being implausible -- I find it hard to believe Tani paused to distinguish the separate smells of the three different types of fish -- this 125-word sentence coming in the middle of the first chapter of the book doesn't exactly pull readers into the story.

Take a look at it with list elements simply stripped away.

Instead of taking any kind of notice of the waves of heat rising from the pavement, of the trees -- where there were any in this part of town -- losing their leaves far too early into the year, of the remaining ice in the fish stalls in Ridley Road Market melting so quickly that the air was thick with the smell of hake and snapper and mackerel, of the meat in the butchers' stalls sending forth a stench of blood from the simmering organs of sheep and cows, of the fruit and veg having to be sold at a discount before they rotted, Abeo merely strode onward in the direction of the Mayville Estate, oblivious of everything save Tani's failure to arrive at work on time.

Or, in clean copy, with the punctuation adjusted and just a bit of rearrangement:

Instead of taking any kind of notice of the heat -- the trees losing their leaves far too early, the thick smells of fish on the melting ice in the fish stalls and blood from the simmering organs in the butcher's stalls -- Abeo merely strode onward, oblivious of everything save Tani's failure to arrive at work on time.

Half the words, with only two elements the father is ignoring -- the loss of leaves and the smells. But every remaining word was already there. The sharp, clean description ("thick smells" is very nice) just needed to be exposed.

In the late forties, an entrepreneur named Earl Muntz wanted to break into the new market for televisions. His plan was to design a simplified, low-cost set for use in metropolitan areas, where the signals were strong and a simpler receiver would be enough. He did it by sitting down with his engineers and snipping the wires to various components in a set until the picture and sound went away. Then he had the engineers hook back up the last thing he'd cut. The process is still known among electrical engineers as "Muntzing."

As you're taking your first pass through your revisions, try some Muntzing. Just throw stuff out. If you see blocks of exposition, cut them. If your characters ramble on, rein them in. If you see lists, cut all but one or two elements. You may find that, like Muntz's TV's, your story still works just as well.