Cut the Good That Harms the Whole

The hardest cut is the one nobody argues for, a passage that is accurate, vivid, maybe the best writing in the manuscript, and wrong for the whole. In nonfiction the darling can be a hard-won fact or an interview that cost weeks, and the effort can become part of the attachment. Arthur Quiller-Couch gave the temptation its famous formulation, “Murder your darlings,” and aimed it at ornament specifically, writing performed for its own admiration (Practice 60 gives the context and the misquotation).

Asked of a passage on its own, “is this good?” is a question a good passage usually passes. The useful question is “is the Work better because this stays?” Judged against the whole, a good passage can fail by being the loudest thing in the room, by delaying a payoff, by making a minor character more interesting than the story can afford, or by repeating what the book has already said better. Every passage claims some of the reader’s attention, and a manuscript can claim only so much, so a beautiful passage in a minor position displaces whatever should have had that attention. It may also teach the reader what the book is about, and teach it wrongly.

None of this makes cutting virtuous in itself or a shorter manuscript a better one; some writers’ first drafts are thin, and their revisions add.

Hemingway left a record of a cut and the reason he gave for it. In A Moveable Feast, published after his death in 1964, he says that in “Out of Season” he omitted “the real end of it,” which was that the old man hanged himself. His reason was a theory that “you could omit anything if you knew that you omitted,” because the omitted part would strengthen the story and make readers feel “something more than they understood.” He gives no sign that the passage was weak. Because the theory depends on knowing what was omitted, the writer still holds what was cut, and it goes on shaping what stays, which is the case for the cuts file in the exercise below. Scholars point out that the hanging may never have been drafted, and the book is a memoir of events long past, so it reconstructs a decision and does not record one made at the time. A theory of omission cannot tell you whether your cut worked. The two-day test can.

The authority to cut belongs to the author, and cuts the author cannot endorse are not yet revision. Gordon Lish’s heavy cuts to Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love went ahead although Carver had written asking him to stop production; Practice 70 tells that case in full.

Some passages look unnecessary and carry a load nobody has noticed, such as a digressive scene that makes a later turn credible, or a piece of context a nonfiction argument needs without saying so. That is why the exercise keeps a way back.

Practice. Move one beloved, unnecessary passage out of the manuscript and into a private cuts file, with a date and a line on what it was for. Read the piece aloud without it. After two days, write down what, specifically, is missing. If the answer is a named thing the Work needs, restore the passage, or the part of it that supplies the thing. If the only answer is that the passage was good, leave it where it is. Either way, write the answer in the cuts file under the date, beside the passage.