How to Reduce

Part ten of How to Sit Down

“Work on good prose has three steps,” writes Walter Benjamin, “a musical one when it is composed, an architectonic one when it is built, and a textile one when it is woven.” He omits a crucial step: a cinematic one when it is edited. Editing is when you can most fully appreciate the material nature of the work. You have created sentences, paragraphs, pages out of nothing, and now you have them in hand and must shape them.

I like to do as much editing as possible while I’m writing; I need to get a sentence generally right in order to move on to the next. But that still leaves a lot of editing to be done later—maybe two hours later, if you’re on a tight deadline. You need a lapse of time to catch unconscious clichés, mangled idioms, sentences out of order, needed clarifications, unattributed pronouns, word repetitions, bad assonances, slips of logic, phrase inversions, missing linkages. That’s the unglamorous house-cleaning side of editing, and it necessitates what you should be doing anyway: incessant rereading from the top (or the most convenient landmark). You should reread not only at the start and end of every day, but after every spurt of work within the day—after a paragraph-long burst, say. You need to keep checking the flow, in more ways than one.

One fruitful way to reread is through the eyes of others. I’ve had a few first readers in my life, but mostly have been too prolific (force of necessity) to make continual demands on them, so have generally gone it alone. Rereading through other eyes then becomes an acting exercise. It’s easy and fun. If a friend tells me she’s read something of mine, I imagine her reading it. Based on what I know of her likes and dislikes, her degree of sensitivity to language, her susceptibility to emotional triggers or her steely analytical approach, I can imagine what parts she responded to, where she might have lifted her eyebrows, when her attention began to drift. This gives me great pleasure. Few people other than interviewers and bores have ever spoken to me about my work in much detail, so all I can do is conjecture how they might be receiving it, anyway.¹

I am being instructed in my rereading by my imagined version of the views of another person. That is, I am filtering my work through the sensibility of someone I know well and whose judgment I trust, as seen through my own flawed lens. That is very helpful for an editorial overview—a kind of guardrail—and a good parlor game for those long winter evenings. While working, though, it is best to avoid familiar voices, which might lead to reflexive behavior. Instead, you can use those same principles to attribute views to a gallery of fictional archetypes. Being a writer means never having to say you’re alone; you have an entire population in your head.

To keep his errors down to minimum, the Internal Censor to whom the poet submits his work in progress should be a Censorate. It should include, for instance, a sensitive only child, a practical housewife, a logician, a monk, an irreverent buffoon and even, perhaps, hated by all the others and returning their dislike, a brutal, foul-mouthed drill sergeant who considers all poetry rubbish. (W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand)

I once knew someone who had acquired a great many writers’-advice guides, ‘90s version, full of exhortations to be bold and free, to throw off the internal censor and run howling with the spirit animal of your choice. I shudder to think of how much bad writing, how many hardbound blank books, how many hand-lettered chapbooks, how much tonnage of 100% post-consumer waste that advice gave rise to. Note that it isn’t all that different from the Surrealists’ championing of automatic writing a hundred years ago. It, too, resulted in aimless sludge. Writing goes nowhere without internal friction. And nowhere at all without empathy, which lies at the root of all this, since imagining your censorate entails being able to see life through others’ eyes. Which is pretty much a prerequisite for writing, you’d think.

Cutting is the glamorous side of editing. Suddenly you’re at the Movieola, razor blade in hand, getting the bank robbery down to as few frames as possible. I only learned this later in life. In 2001, for the tenth anniversary of Low Life, my editor, Jonathan Galassi, asked me to write a new afterword. I produced a rambling, amorphous mess, which was duly published. Then Barbara Epstein, my NYRB editor, said she’d love to run it, but I’d have to cut it by two thirds. I was taken aback. Was that even possible? I had little choice, so I got to work. First I cut stand-alone anecdotes, sometimes amounting to whole paragraphs, keeping only the crucial ones. There were plenty of non sequiturs, vague attempts at evoking the ineffable, drifts of memory, all just begging to be chopped. I felt energized by the time I got to cutting individual sentences, and when I ran out of those I cut phrases, then words. Getting to the stipulated count was painless, even exhilarating. With every cut the prose became leaner, more sculpted. I had achieved a rhythm I’d never quite hit before. I felt like I’d gotten a makeover. Discovering cutting was like learning one of those ancient kitchen tricks, reliably effective and infuriatingly simple, that your aunt will finally tell you when you’re sixty.

I learned about cutting because I had to, but soon began applying those principles to everything I wrote. By now it’s almost reflexive, and cutting begins as I am writing. Once you start cutting you become aware of all the fat, all the superfluities in your prose, and you kill them on sight by instinct, like cockroaches. Naturally, the cutting is guided by your sense of the overall work, its sense and its music. There is nothing formulaic about it. Your mileage may vary. Lean prose is not everyone’s taste, and it may be mine only for a while. I did cut my memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name, to the bone. Cutting responded to my sense of urgency, also the need to not bore readers with fine-grained dioramas of my life. I heard a certain kind of song in my head while I was doing it—I mean a prose song—but I didn’t know what it was. A few months after it was published my coin dropped, as we used to say. I had written:

For three months I was on fire. I looked out at a world gone tilt. I was undergoing violent revolution. Every particle of my being was open to question, was minutely reviewed, was loudly debated, was denounced or redeemed. I was in a wind tunnel, blasted relentlessly by emotions, reflections, memories, sudden insights, minor epiphanies, things I didn’t think I knew, angles I’d never considered….

I finally remembered my source riddim:

I have loved people. I have lost them. I went mad when that blow struck me, because it is hell. But there was no witness to my madness, my frenzy was not evident; only my innermost being was mad. Sometimes I became enraged. People would say to me, “Why are you so calm?” But I was scorched from head to foot; at night I would run through the streets and howl; during the day I would work calmly. (Maurice Blanchot, The Madness of the Day, tr. Lydia Davis)

1. Over many years of giving readings, I’ve developed a useless superpower. The following day, when I reread what I read, I can play back every cough, chortle, and exit as they occurred.