The Joy of Cutting. Francine Prose on Good Writing by Cutting. On a retreat two weeks ago, I started reading a book I checked out from a place where they lend you books.

It’s called Five Weeks in the Country by Francine Prose.

How could you not be a writer if your name is Prose?

Apparently Charles Dickens was drunk and invited Hans Christian Andersen to come visit the country home where he was pretending to be well-bred with his soon-to-be ex-wife and his nine children. Andersen stayed for “five weeks.” Prose takes this true fact and some known historical information and constructs an interesting tale of what it may have been like, narrated by a chorus of the Dickens children.

I’m halfway through it, but there are two things I wanted to bring up about this book.

First is the amazing way Prose’s narrator(s) uses something like subtle sarcasm to convey an enormity of information. I don’t remember ever seeing anyone do this before. I tend not to like sarcasm. Now I love it.

Here are some examples:

The opening line: “Father used to love us. He didn’t love us anymore.” (p. 1)

Then: “He was Happiness Itself. Mr. Christmas Morning. Mr. Perpetual Motion. Mr. Good Works. Mr. Charity. Mr. Domestic Bliss. Being so jolly and energetic must have seemed like another job. How rapidly his smile faded when only we were watching.” (p. 3)

And: “We were shocked when tears spilled from his eyes, where there had always been laughter. He told us that he was weeping because our brother Walter was leaving for India. Did that mean we too had to go far away for him to love us again?” (p. 3)

That was all in the first three pages.

She doesn’t stop to explain that Dickens was emotionally distant from his children. She doesn’t tell us that he could be charming and joyful in public while being very different at home.

She gives us:

“How rapidly his smile faded when only we were watching.”

That’s enough.

But the second thing is what I’d like to ruminate on today: something Prose said on a podcast with David Perell:

“The joy of cutting.”

She said writing a rough draft is terribly difficult, and she can only work at it a couple of hours a day. But editing is fun. Then she used that phrase: “the joy of cutting.”

I know a lot of people who write books. Most don’t like to cut. These words and stories are our babies. We wrote that. We worked hard. That story, though it doesn’t advance the message or the plot, really happened, and people gotta know!

My brother-in-law is a computer programmer who writes. He’s quite good at both programming and writing. (I’ve never met a computer programmer who writes and doesn’t write well.)

He recently entered a short-story competition where the story had to be 500 words or fewer. He cut and cut and cut until he had it down to 498. Then he showed it to a friend, and his friend said, “You can still cut out a fourth of this.”

He said at first it was brutal. Then it was fun.

When you are committed to cutting, you are committed to learning what is essential. Removing what is not essential is a kindness to the reader.

Remember, we’re trying to communicate something.

A recent client of mine told me that someone who read his rough draft said, “You really made me work for it.”

While your reader may have a sense of accomplishment after working hard to understand you, I wouldn’t take the chance that your reader is going to hang in there in today’s age of short attention spans.

So try this.

Write something. Five hundred words or so.

Then cut out half without losing the meaning.

Then cut out half again and post it in the comments.

(Here’s a hint: editors usually cut my adverbs first [and it’s annoying!])!

Jeff B. Miller

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