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Cut-and-Paste Revising and the Collage

One of the great advantages of an approach to writing where you make a mess during the first half is that you have to clean up that mess before you are done. You can't let yourself slip into halfhearted, soft-minded revising where you just tidy things up and call it a day. Making a mess means that your revising tool is not a touch-up brush, to start with anyway, but a chain saw. It means that you can't possibly revise without stopping and thinking hard about what you really mean, about what you are trying to accomplish-even if you think you already made those decisions. The main message about revising in this book is that it is a lot of work. One of the great advantages of an approach to writing where you make a mess during the first half is that you have to clean up that mess before you are done. You can't let yourself slip into halfhearted, soft-minded revising where you just tidy things up and call it a day. Making a mess means that your revising tool is not a touch-up brush, to start with anyway, but a chain saw. It means that you can't possibly revise without stopping and thinking hard about what you really mean, about what you are trying to accomplish-even if you think you already made those decisions. The main message about revising in this book is that it is a lot of work. But there is an easy way to revise -- not simple but relatively quick and effortless: cut-and-paste revising. It's especially useful if you are in a hurry or don't care too much, but it can also lead to very good final drafts. Better, sometimes, than you achieve with other methods of revising.

For one of the most frequent problems in writing, especially creative writing, is making things worse instead of better when you revise. You start out with raw writing that you know has good things in it, or perhaps you've even worked out a coherent draft and you are pleased with its strengths, its life. But obviously it needs revising. So you revise. But when you finish you discover you've snuffed the life out of your piece. You've removed the problems you were trying to get rid of but somehow you've also destroyed or crippled what was good.

Cutting and pasting is a minimal revising process that helps you get rid of what's weak without undermining what's strong. You let your good passages speak for themselves but you don't add the flatfooted writing that sometimes comes later as you try to make sure that all your ideas get through clearly -- or in the case of poems, stories, and plays, the soggy writing that often comes when you start "clarifying" and interpreting your own imaginative vision.The essential process is obvious. Cut-and-paste virtually says it all. In effect you throw away your pen or pencil and revise with nothing but scissors and paste. You will be like a stone sculptor who never adds anything -- only removes. Or like one of those painters who first applies a number of layers of pigment on the canvas and then creates a painting solely by scraping with a knife. There is an act of discipline and faith here. You must insist on finding the ingredients you need in what you've already put on paper. And you must insist on creating the coherence you need by rearranging, not rewriting. Thus this method only works well when you've achieved some richness in your raw writing.The steps are as follows.

•	Find the good passages and cut them away from their surroundings -- even if you need to cut in mid-sentence. And cross out the words and phrases that can be removed even from these good passages. Unnecessary words.
•	By looking over these good passages and playing with different sequences for them, and by thinking back over the rest of your raw writing, try to figure out what essential thread or shape or meaning is trying to emerge from it all. (This is different from other revising processes where you might look through your raw writing and see that it more or less says X, but then realize -- perhaps by seeing it on paper -- that Y is really what you want to say: such revising permits you to change your mind. But with cut-and-paste revising you must find the best thread in your material and go with it. You aren't so much deciding what you want to say, as you are sensing what is good and seeing what it points to.) You may need to make some kind of outline or visual plan at this point if your piece is at all complicated.
•	Next put your pieces in their best order. It can be intriguing to make a game of it and see if you can actually finish the job with this step and produce a final coherent draft with no new writing at all. But this purist puzzle-solving approach will probably use up any time you might otherwise save with the cut-and-paste method.
Now that all your pieces are in the right order, do what little writing is necessary to connect them and make a complete and coherent whole. There may be some places where you need to add something entirely lacking in your raw writing. There may be some places where you can't get your fragments to connect with each other except by adding a sentence or two. And you may feel the need for a freshly written introduction or conclusion. But be sure to experiment with passages you already have. Often what looks like an unlikely passage will click into place when you actually try it out in that beginning or ending slot.

You will probably be able to tighten and clarify a bit as you copy it over and remove mistakes in grammar and usage.

The cut-and-paste method, especially if you are trying to save time and effort, should result in a stripped-down kind of final draft. The weaknesses will consist primarily of omissions, but omissions often do less harm than passages that don't work. Indeed if you get skilled with this method, you can begin to achieve effects -- as in those bare Picasso line drawings -- where the minimalism is a strength and not a weakness.

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