Get out the scissors!

Stay with me to the end — you’ll be glad you did.

***

I have a devil of a time inventing fresh ways of saying the same old thing. How many different ways can I say, “Nemara took flight”? After a while, it gets to be a real challenge, especially when I exclude passive constructions (“. . . and Nemara was airborne”).

More troubling still is the challenge of coming up with eye-poppingly fresh word combinations. Hard enough to avoid trite phrasing, but innovation? That’s work. And yet, that’s just the sort of thing which makes readers (and, I hope, agents, editors, and publishers) love a writer. How do I make my brain do that?

William S. Burroughs had a way. With the cut-up technique (developed by Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and others) he would cut up his sentences and rearrange them randomly. In this way, he would arrive at novel juxtapositions.

Burroughs’s words (see that last link):

The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for seventy years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtapositon cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writings seems to be done almost by accident . . . You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

What does this look like in practice? Here’s a brief bit from Burroughs’s Nova Express (more here):

They do not have what they call “emotion’s oxygen” in the atmosphere. The medium in which animal life breathes is not in that soulless place -Yellow plains under white hot blue sky – Metal cities controlled by The Elders who are heads in bottles – Fastest brains preserved forever – Only form of immortality open to the Insect People of Minraud – An intricate bureaucracy wired to the control brains directs all movement through telepathic misdirection and camouflage – The partisans make recordings ahead in time and leave the recordings to be picked up by control stations while they are free for a few seconds to organize underground activities –

I’m not suggesting you write whole novels this way (as Burroughs did). You may, however, want to try the cut-up technique as a way of forcing serendipity. Does your descriptive passage lack zing? Are you blocked on snappy dialog? Blocked, period? Get out the scissors!

Electronic scissors, that is. You guessed it: there are software hacks that will do the scut-work for you. The Grazulis Cut-up Machine, for example. Cut and paste a few of your paragraphs into the Machine and see what you get. It doesn’t provide instant brilliance, but I guarantee you, you’ll have more than a few “gee, whiz!” moments.

I took a 183-word snip from my novel and let the Machine do its thing. Here are three interesting phrases:

and would skirt the turned night into day.

Then he would head southwest, high hundred square miles of old growth love lay waiting.

low on the eastern horizon, fat across the southeastern sky.

From those, I would chip away still more, leaving me with (in my opinion) two gems:

skirt the turned night into day

fat across the southeastern sky

My son came by a moment ago and asked me what I was doing. By way of explanation, I cut-up his essay today (on Mark Twain’s attitude towards good and evil, as seen in The Mysterious Stranger). Here’s the gem:

When the people in The Mysterious Stranger burn they’re ridding the world of something God doesn’t want, they can take on anything because God is with good and evil is far from a Christian’s attitude

At the very least, the Machine is a cool toy; at best, a shortcut to genius.

Do you want to do a lot of this stuff? Not unless you want folks to compare you to the poetic crowd, e.g. M. John Harrison, China Mieville, or Neil Gaiman. Heaven knows you wouldn’t want that.

With my voice, I would need to use such clever tricks sparingly. I like a plain prose style with little in the way of authorial theatrics. But some of my characters think in a more poetic voice than I typically use; they could use a dose of the Machine. Also, my descriptive passages, while brief and to the point, hunger for freshness.

Check it out and let me know what you think. Share a few gems, if you’re so-minded.

D.

PS: I suspect GIGO applies here (garbage in, garbage out). If you write with active verbs and eye-catching nouns, you’re more likely to generate gems. But that’s true anyway 🙂